Home > Prominent Statisticians Urge Investigation of U.S. Presidential Election Results

Prominent Statisticians Urge Investigation of U.S. Presidential Election Results

by Open-Publishing - Monday 31 January 2005
4 comments

Elections-Elected USA

Prominent Statisticians Refute ’Explanation’ of 2004 U.S. Exit Poll Discrepancies in New Edison/Mitofsky Report and Urge Investigation of U.S. Presidential Election Results.

President Bush won November’s election by 2.5% yet exit polls showed Kerry leading by 3%. Which was correct?

"There are statistical indications that a systematic, nationwide shift of 5.5% of the vote may have occurred, and that we’ll never get to the bottom of this, unless we gather the data we need for mathematical analysis and open, robust scientific debate.", says Bruce O’Dell, USCountVotes’ Vice President.

The study, “Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report”, was co-authored by a diverse group of professors and academicians specializing in statistics and mathematics. The USCountVotes team included Josh Mitteldorf, Ph.D., Temple University Statistics Department; Kathy Dopp, M.S. in mathematics, USCountVotes President; Steven F. Freeman, Ph.D., Visiting Scholar & Affiliated Faculty, Center for Organizational Dynamics, University of Pennsylvania; Brian Joiner, Ph.D., Professor of Statistics and Director of Statistical Consulting (ret), University of Wisconsin; Frank Stenger, Ph.D. Professor of Numerical Analysis, School of Computing, University of Utah; Richard G. Sheehan, Ph.D. Professor, Department of Finance, University of Notre Dame, Elizabeth Liddle, M.A. (UK) Ph.D. candidate at the University of Nottingham, Paul F. Velleman, Assoc. Professor, Ph.D., Department of Statistical Sciences, Cornell University; Victoria Lovegren, Ph.D., Lecturer, Department of Mathematics, Case Western Reserve University; Campbell B. Read, Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Department of Statistical Science, Southern Methodist University. Their study does not support claims made by Edison Media Research and Mitofsky International that exit poll errors were to blame for the unprecedented 5.5% discrepancy between exit polls and official 2004 election results.

According to this analysis by a group of senior statisticians, the new data just released by the exit-pollsters shows that the possibility that the overall vote count was substantially corrupted must be taken seriously. “Now we have statistical evidence that these reports were the tip of a national iceberg. The hypothesis that the discrepancy between the exit polls and election results is due to errors in the official election tally is a coherent theory that must be explored,” said statistician Josh Mitteldorf.

Their paper titled "Response to Edison/Mitofsky Election System 2004 Report" notes that the Edison/Mitofsky report offers no evidence to support their conclusion that Kerry voters “participated in the exit polls at a higher rate than Bush voters”. In fact, the data provided in the Edison/Mitofsky report suggests that the opposite may have been true: Bush strongholds had slightly higher response rates than Kerry strongholds.

The statisticians go on to note that precincts with hand-counted paper ballots showed no statistical discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results, but for other voting technologies, the overall discrepancy was far larger than the polls’ margin of error. The pollsters at Edison/Mitofsky agreed that their 2004 exit polls, for whatever reason, had the poorest accuracy in at least twenty years.

full report(article format)
"Election Fraud Update: Experts Respond to Mitofsky’s Exit Poll Report"

http://bellaciao.org/en/article.php...

Forum posts

  • When will the american people wake up and realize that bush and co stole this election. The facts speak for themselves. How many PHD’s have to come forward? Why would any counrty have its citizens vote on machines with no paper trail using secret (proprietory) software, have private companies count and tabulate the votes using computer systems connected to modems and thereby open to hacking with no public transparent oversite? The only answer is to control the outcome of elections. The american people are the dumbest people to ever walk the face of the earth to let this happen.

    • Check out my story at www.coastalpost.com "We The People Do Not Concede"

      Those who voted for kerry, be they life long Democrats, or those of a more libertarian or progressive bent, know the truth. These voters were stunned by the theft of the election.

      However, most Americans are BLIND to the fact that our press is now controlled by the same shadow government forces who daily plaster our TV with ads to buy air deoderizers containing benzene (the most toxic of all chemicals). (Who is it that Saddam Hussein is the only monster that ever knowingly poisoned his own people?) Our corporate military industrial culture has a revolving door between government agency positions, elected officials, laboratory researchers, General Electric, Raytheon etc. They mislead us each and every time one of us listens to the radio or watches the brain entrainer known as TV. The profit line is all they care about. Halkliburton alone has stolen 4 to 6 billion dollars out of Irqaq, while taxpayers and Iraqi civilians continue to eat the deadly cost of that war.

      We do NOT have a free press. And because of this, Bush wiill be allowed to keep his ill-begotten position. A populace that is not united (because each of us think we and our few friends are the only ones of a small group that guess something was up) cannot rebel.

      If you want Democracy in 2005, move to the Ukraine.

      Carol Dagg Sterritt

      PS And I don’t mind if a candidate I voted for loses legitimately - it is the wholesale theft and the media cover-up that keeps me aware of the fascistic noose around our necks. The people in the Ukraine voted with their bodies OUT ONT THE STREETS when their election was stolen. The difference between that populace and ours? They remember that a stolen election precedes the destruction of a country. They can remember the bodies hanging from ropes on tree branches in their parks. They know what fascism ultimately does.

      Our technology is so vastly different. What will fascism 2005 look like? Well, possibly the nuclear (terrorist attack, they will call it) destruction of an area of the country that the Bushites don’t like. Boston, San Francisco, etc.
      Watch George Schultz - if he moves out of the Bay Area - it is time to follow suit.

    • RIGHT ON!!
      The center of this malignancy consuming our country is THE MEDIA!!
      We Americans need to boycott the traditional media and spread the news to people that the supposed media does NOT report the news...they MAKE the news!
      We need to be the media, we need to keep people informed about the REAL issues ie) Election Theft 2004, Constitutional Challenge to Election 1/6/05, protesters on Inaug. Day.
      We should be nourished in this quest by the knowledge that as the exit polls proved, WE ARE THE MAJORITY... those who did not vote for Bush! We have our followers we just need to bring them with us in this journey to cure this cancer that calls itself Our Administration!

    • Sites like this Bellaciao, TheRawStory and Dahr Jamail are where I get my news now. I quit watching the network propaganda a couple of months ago. After I came to the realization that our election was stolen and the media was silent. Koby Bryant, Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson were all they talked about.

      DemocracyNow is another excellent source of REAL news coverage.