Fraud in Florida?

Exit Polls Legacy blog posts

A quick note before anyone emails to ask whether I think these guys are "delusional" too. The release posted on RottenDenmark indicates that the team from the Research Center at the U. Cal. Berkeley will release evidence from some sort of new study. They "will report irregularities associated with electronic voting machines may have awarded 130,000-260,000 or more excess votes to President George W. Bush in Florida in the 2004 presidential election." Details will follow at a press conference later today, though I’m guessing their study is more than a rehash of the exit poll discrepancy. This is obviously a serious effort by a serious institution; it should be interesting.

To those who saw his post this morning, I believe Mr. Kaus slightly misread MayflowerHill in reporting that Warren Mitofsky "disprove[d] the idea that the no-paper-trail electronic voting machines in Florida were rigged" [emphasis added]. MayflowerHill’s account makes no specific reference to Florida.

I am guessing that Mitofsky’s analysis was done at the national level. When I described this method of analysis in earlier posts (here and here), I should have pointed out a few important limitations. Dr. Fritz Scheuren, VP for Statistics at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) summarized the most important in an email on the AAPOR listserv a few days ago (quoted with permission):

Three cautions here. First the number of precincts under each method can get very small. Take Ohio for example where 75% of the voting was still done with punch cards and only 25% was electronic.

Second, the comparisons of voting outcomes are obviously not free of preexisting precinct differences, Such differences surely confound the results in a way that would be hard to adjust for, adding still more uncertainty.

Third, for some analyses it is the precinct, and not the voter, that is the unit of analysis and here the small number of precincts just about sinks us in any individual within state work that rely on exit polls.

The exit polls typically sampled 40-50 precincts per state (although Florida may have had more – it certainly had more interviews than other states). To analyze the source of the discrepancy with actual votes, Mitofsky’s best unit of analysis would have been precincts not voters, so his ability to detect differences within a single state are limited.

Corrected mispelling of Berkeley 11/19.

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is political pollster with deep and varied experience across survey research, campaigns, and media. The original "Mystery Pollster" and co-creator of Pollster.com, he explains complex concepts to a multitude of audiences and how data informs politics and decision-making. A researcher and consultant who crafts effective questions and identifies innovative solutions to deliver results. An award winning political journalist who brings insights and crafts compelling narratives from chaotic data.