Reply #60: Further discussion...

[althecat]

In your 1st para you kindly accept the general thesis being advanced here. Namely that if the NEP is given a bit of credit then the numbers suggest organised vote padding in the cities.

But if this was the case, variance in padding rate should be reflected both in variance in poll-count discrepancies and variance in Bush's performance relative to 2000. And, unfortunately for that theory, these two measures are not correlated with each other. This means that theory two (above) is a lot less likely than theory one.

It is clearly evidence in terms of "variance in Bush's performance relative to 2000" bush did no where near as good in urban areas in 2000 vs 2004. I do not know what you mean by "variance in poll-count discrepancies".

It looks to me as though National precinct sample of big cities happened to have non-representative turnout rate. This is not surprising in such a small sample. And the demographic composition, will, as I said, be warped by the extent of the reweighting process itself.

If you are correct about this then the NEP seems a great deal more amateurish than I would have thought it was. You keep asserting that there are only 30 urban precincts in the exit poll. I thought there were roughly 1800 precincts in the exit poll or something of that order. 30 seems a tad on the low side.

Your suggestion that the 66% over estimation of turnout is due to sampling error and MOE on the small urban sample is I am afraid hard to believe. It is too big an error even for a deeply flawed poll. For the NEP team to have published these "adjusted" figures for the purpose of serious analysis, knowing that they could be some thoroughly flawed is remarkable and negligent.

As time goes by the multi-million NEP - the biggest of its kind ever conduced - appears to become ever more flawed.

Therefore lets go back to where you started from the previous post and consider what you are saying.

If the bush vote was systematically padded in urban areas then where else should we look in the exit poll data to find evidence of this?

In addition if the bush vote was systematically padded in urban areas then where else should we look in the declared results to find evidence of this?

Back to you.