Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible; New Study

Sunday, 15 May 2005
2004 Presidential Election: Hypotheses of Fraud Remain Credible; New Scientific Study Released
http://uscountvotes.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=94&Itemid=41
May 15, 2005

The persistence of credible hypotheses of election fraud, six months after the election, underscores the fragility of the U.S. electoral system. US Count Votes continues its systematic statistical study of the discrepancy between the Edison-Mitofsky exit polls and November's reported presidential election results.

Miami, FL. – Ron Baiman, Ph.D. of US Count Votes and the Institute of Government and Public Affairs of Chicago, will release the new results at the meeting of the American Association of Political Opinion Researchers today, Saturday at a 2:15 p.m. Press Conference in the Hotel Fontainebleau Hilton Resort lobby, 4441 Collins Avenue, Miami Beach, FL 33140.

Peter Pekarsky, the lead attorney being sued by Ohio Secretary of State Kenneth Blackwell, will be available to talk about what has happened in Ohio, and why the election needs to be investigated.

Mitofsky, of the Edison/Mitofsky group who released an analysis on January 19th of their November 2nd exit poll that had predicted a strong win for Kerry, will also be in attendance at the AAPOR conference.

The National Election Data Archive (NEDA) today has released a new report, demonstrating that data from the Edison/Mitofsky analysis is consistent with the hypothesis of a corrupted vote count, and inconsistent with the competing idea that Bush voters were under-sampled in the poll. Using numerical modeling techniques to simulate the effect of polling bias, NEDA scientists are able to reproduce signature patterns in the Edison/Mitofsky data by incorporating a general shift in the official vote tally in the model.

Most telling is the fact that the highest participation rates and the peak disparity between poll and official returns both occurred in precincts where Bush made his strongest showing. This feature of the data is inconsistent with the Edison/Mitofsky assumption that polling
bias was responsible for the gap.

For the complete report, see
http://uscountvotes.org/ucvAnalysis/US/exit-polls/USCV_exit_poll_simulations.pdf

This paper follows an earlier study released on March 31, 2005, by a group of statisticians for the National Election Data Archive Project, Analysis of the 2004 Presidential Election Exit Poll Discrepancies.

Contact: Kathy Dopp, US Count Votes, President

kathy@uscountvotes.org electionarchive.org