Unsupported Claims About Stolen Elections Begin - Again!

Although there are reasonable grounds for being concerned about Obama losing the 2008 elections, despite the overwhelming weight of polling evidence, explanations for this in terms of “stolen elections” have already begun.

It is surprising to find that one such posting has appeared on ePluribus Media, a blog which likes to apply and require of its contributors some rigorous evidence to support conclusions.

The commentary is titled "Exit Poll Mess - 2008 The Past is Prolog” and raises a reasonable question about an apparent anomaly in exit polling figures and the subsequent announced results. Like many such posts published immediately after the 2008 election, it is supported by part data graphically displayed that gives some semblance of “evidence”, sufficient to induce the first response to be headed “I find your research on this fascinating".

The information provided in the initial commentary are reasons for questions but do not constitute research to support the conclusions.

We are all aware of the furore that the apparent blatant discrepancy between exit polls and declared results in Ohio caused across our blogs in 2004. Reams were written about it, vast amounts of statistical analysis was produced. Much of it was faulty and lacked academic rigor. Some was much more detailed and prompted the beginning of serious research.

The best of this initial work was undertaken by a contributor to the blog that I had setup called New International Times. She is a remarkable person. In her fifties, she had been a professional classical musician before undertaking a change of direction and working for a new degree in psychology.

With a real interest and aptitude for statistical analysis, she became intrigued by the work being undertaken on Daily Kos. Many of the posts, that included voluminous graphs and tables, were being questioned by a few at a time when the “gestalt” on the site was to support the overwhelming desire to prove that the election was stolen.

So began our contributor’s work. Her background was a bit different from the main contributors to our site. Unlike us, she was not a Liberal Democrat but a member of the Labour Party, despite her disgust with Blair and what she saw as his betrayal of the principles of socialism with she had first become attracted to what became known in the UK as “Old Labour”.

Not surprisingly, her motivation was to prove that those who doubted the worrying evidence of manipulation of the election results in Ohio provided by the exit polls were wrong to do so.
The intensity of her work increased as she found the material far more complex than she had originally supposed. Of even greater concern to her, it pointed to a different conclusion than that which she had originally set out to prove.

At that point, she felt it important that her work was capable of serious academic review, as it would undoubtedly be challenged. As a consequence, she developed what had originally been intended as a detailed diary into a full and lengthy thesis. Despite it formality, Marcos agreed that it was published simultaneously on New International Times and Daily Kos.

She was right that her work would come under exacting scrutiny. It was picked up by academia in the United States and underwent the severest of peer review. It withstood the harshest of these critical examination by others, peer reviews that at times placed her under considerable personal stress.

The final outcome was that she was invited as a speaker to the main post-election conference of those who are expert in the disciplined analysis of polling data in the States and became a paid researcher in the research team of a Professor of one of your leading universities who specialises in this subject.

I am not a statistician, nor would I pretend to have the knowledge to contribute seriously on the subject of the apparent anomalies between exit polls and results. I do know the honesty of the person who began the first really serious analysis of the 2004 exit poll data, know her original intentions and know the integrity with which she brought to her work that led to her conclusions that did not fit well with her political leanings nor her original intentions.

Four years on, I have difficulty in awakening further interest in this subject. It is, of course, right that bloggers continue to raise questions for which they feel they do not have the answers. To raise those questions, however, is not to produce proof capable of rigorous scrutiny and to contend that this is clear and irrefutable evidence of the claims of this writer to support the statement with which he apparently concurs that “… there something very wrong with the 2004 election results, i.e., the election was almost certainly stolen.”

By all means let us maintain scrutiny, but let us not do so in a way that distracts from the far more interesting area of voter suppression, which I believe is of far greater importance in the outcome of US elections.