This is the NICE Bruce O'Dell thread - Democratic Underground

Melissa G

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Sun Jun-12-05 08:23 AM
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This is the NICE Bruce O'Dell thread

I'm reposting this thread. The other is too long. I'm tired of folks giving grief to TFC. I'm tired of folks being rude to other DU members. BE NICE ON THIS THREAD!
If you are an academic.. realize that there are other non academics reading and make an effort to be interesting and CLEAR to those who may also be reading. Please read our work on DU by using the Advanced search feature. If You believe in rBr please read why most of us don't first and provide some NEW information to our discussion.
PM me if you want to yell at me for doing this but I, like TFC think this is an OK discussion to have as long as we abide by the above rules. Be civil, Shred Ideas not People. Be Interesting and Entertaining when you can...it's more Fun that way.

I'm Bruce O'Dell - the Vice President and co-founder of US Count Votes.

With all due respect, I believe Ron's interpretation of Mitofsky's findings is fundamentally mistaken, and so is the USCV Working Paper, first published May 12.

After unsuccessfully working within US Count Votes to revise or retract the Working Paper that a minority of the USCV membership recently published, I see no alternative but to publicly challenge the report’s methodology and conclusions.

The key argument of the USCV Working Paper is that Edison/Mitofsky’s exit poll data cannot be explained without either (1) highly improbable patterns of exit poll participation between Kerry and Bush supporters that vary significantly depending on the partisanship of the precinct in a way that is impossible to explain, or (2) vote fraud. Since they rule out the first explanation, the authors of the Working Paper believe they have made the case that widespread vote fraud must have actually occurred.

However, a closer look at the data they cite in their report reveals that Kerry and Bush supporter exit poll response rates actually did not vary significantly by precinct partisanship. Systematic exit poll bias cannot be ruled out as an explanation of the 2004 Presidential exit poll discrepancy – nor can widespread vote count corruption. The case for fraud is still unproven, and I believe will never be able to be proven through exit poll analysis alone.

The fact that I chose not to endorse the USCV Working Paper should be a clear indication that I do not support its central thesis, and in fact believe that the simulation data they cite refutes the Working Paper’s conclusions.

I am not a statistician, but as a computer systems architect, I create mathematical models to simulate the performance of large-scale computer systems, and mathematical simulation of the cost and efficiency of business processes is a significant part of my consulting practice. My own election simulation results are cited on pp. 9 -10 and in Appendix G of the May 12th Working Paper; as the creator of the only USCV simulation which accurately reproduces aggregate Mean WPE, Median WPE and participation rate data from the E/M January report, I feel an obligation to ensure that my work is correctly interpreted.

I can show that several of the USCV election simulation programs are flawed, and that when the Liddle Bias Index is applied to the “USCV O’Dell simulation” data cited in the Working Paper, it produces results consistent with those recently reported by Warren Mitofsky for the E/M data as a whole.

I respect Ron's opinion, but his insistence on using aggregate WPE as a tool to interpret poll response bias (or vote fraud) is mistaken. His analysis of the Liddle Bias Index is also off-target. Liddle's Bias Index is an inherently superior metric to WPE, and analyses based on aggregate WPE are highly misleading.

I've written a paper that addressed this issues in detail, that can be found at www.digitalagility.com/data/ODell_Response_to_USCV_Work... .

If anyone can show me where I'm wrong, I'll be the first to admit it.

I'm disappointed that I was not able to resolve our disagreement within USCV, but I simply cannot allow a fundamental misinterpretation of my data - the USCV O'Dell simulator they cite in their paper - to continue to go unchallenged.

In addition responding to this posting, please feel free to contact me at my email address at USCV, bruce@uscountvotes.org - or at my corporate email address at bodell@digitalagility.com if you have any questions.