Open Letter to Mark Blumenthal of Pollster.com

On July 4 you wrote about the Daily Kos/ Research 2000 controversy at pollster.com. You stated that “pollsters and social scientists never have the "discretion" to simply "adjust" the substantive results of their surveys, within the margin of error or otherwise”.

Mark, you know better than that. The exit pollsters do it all the time. In fact, it’s standard operating procedure to force the exit polls to match the recorded vote. The matching process is a stated policy of the National Election Pool, the mainstream media consortium that funds the exit pollsters. Unlike the pre-election adjustments made by that minor player R2K, forcing the exit polls to match the vote serves to camouflage election fraud. But election analysts were not fooled by it.

You wrote:
By far the most troubling part of Ali's response comes in these two sentences (left in their original form including typographical errors):

“Regardless though, to you so-called polling experts, each sub grouping, gender, race, party ID, etc must equal the top line number or come pretty darn close. Yes we weight heavily and I will, using the margin of error adjust the top line and when adjusted under my discretion as both a pollster and social scientist, therefore all sub groups must be adjusted as well”.

Pollsters and social scientists do often adjust their top line demographic results, and some will weight on attitude measurements like party identification, to correct for non-response bias (though party weighting continues to be subject of considerable debate in the industry). In either case, however, the adjustment needs to be grounded in prior empirical evidence -- U.S. census demographic estimates or, perhaps, previous surveys of the same population -- and not merely the whim of the researcher.

The NEP procedure of matching to the recorded vote is statistically unsound and contrary to the scientific method, regardless of whether the recorded vote is fraudulent or fraud-free.And in every election since 1968, as shown in the True Vote Model, the recorded vote has deviated widely from the True Vote. In the eleven elections, the Republicans won the recorded vote by 49-45%; the Democrats won the True Vote by exactly the reverse: 49-45%.

The true intent of the electorate has been nullified though a combination of phantom voters and uncounted votes, the result of electronic vote-switching, ballot stuffing and spoilage. See the Recursive True Vote Model (1968-2008).

To illustrate, the 2004 and 2008 Final National Exit Polls are shown below. In order to force a match to the recorded vote, the exit pollsters indicated that 110% of living 2000 Bush voters returned to vote in 2004 and 103% of living Bush 2004 voters returned in 2008. These impossible return voter weightings had the effect of reducing both Kerry’s and Obama’s margin by 13 million votes. When a feasible turnout was used, Kerry won the True Vote by 10 million and Obama won by 22 million.

Note the use of preliminary 12:22am National Exit Poll vote shares in the 2004 True Vote Model. They were used because the Final NEP shares were inflated for Bush (along with the turnout of returning 2000 Bush voters) in order to match the fraudulent recorded vote.

The 2008 True Vote assumes the Final vote shares. Evidently, the NEP consortium do not want a repeat of the 2004 exit poll controversies, so they have decided not to release the unadjusted and preliminary state and national exit polls. Why don’t you lobby the NEP for the data? It can’t hurt us, although it might hurt them.

In June 2006, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. wrote Was the 2004 Election Stolen? in Rolling Stone Magazine. Farhad Manjoo of Salon immediately attempted to refute the article with this rebuttal . Farhad was himself debunked by many election researchers, including Bob Fitrakis, Paul Lehto, 'malcolm' on Daily Kos,
Ron Baiman, Thom Hartmann, Steve Freeman, Michael Collins, Cliff Arnebeck, Mark Crispin Miller and myself.

On the Mystery Pollster blog, you attempted to defend Farhad: Mystery Pollster: Is RFK, Jr. Right About Exit Polls?

I recently responded to your arguments with this rebuttal.

ENDS

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