Halloween Sampling
As the election nears, polls are running our lives; why are they all different? Why has McCain suddenly shot upward to within a few points of Obama? Perhaps he hasn’t — but because of the various factors within polling [the questions, their framing and those responding] you get what’s called a ’sampling.’ The different pollsters get different results, which leaves us with as much sure knowledge as is found in examining chicken entrails.
- Fox News released a poll on Thursday showing a mere 3-point lead for Barack Obama, and McCain officials have apparently pushed the results around to some reporters, trying (again) to stir up a narrative of a GOP comeback.
McCain has proven to have more lives than a cat, but I’m not sure another poll can pump much juice into his campaigns carcass now; it’s an interesting pitch and perhaps works in Obama’s favor to keep his supporters from becoming complacent while boosting the hopes of the Right-leaning.
I do keep tabs on the electoral college, though — you’ll find a graph here; on Tuesday next, when you’re watching returns, keep an eye on Virginia and Florida, particularly. They will set the early tone for what comes after.
Today, Florida has vote purging issues — and Colorado has had earlier purges restored; this kind of information changes daily but the Good News is that the majority of courts are not dragging their feet on rulings, and that voting rights advocates have been proactive; this is NOT 2000 … despite the energy signatures. Maybe this time we prove we can do it right?
The polling and electioneering reads below are your trick for the day.
Here’s your treat: Obama and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow hold an intelligent discourse. Think what that might do for the average IQ if we heard it more often than not … say as the remarks of a standing President of the United States. Spur us to thoughtful investigation, for instance; encourage us to begin thinking for ourselves? Teach our kids that intellect is a GOOD thing?
Just listening to this illustrates that neither the president nor the media have done their job in eight long years — what is essentially a pretty dry exchange actually gets our pulse racing a bit. It will take us awhile to remember what ’smart’ sounds like.
Happy Halloween!
Jude
McCain’s Favorite Poll Of The Day, And Why It’s Wrong
Seth Colter Walls, HuffPo
October 30, 2008
Fox News released a poll on Thursday showing a mere 3-point lead for Barack Obama, and McCain officials have apparently pushed the results around to some reporters, trying (again) to stir up a narrative of a GOP comeback.
Two points: 1) the Fox poll isn’t evidence of a McCain comeback. And 2) contrary to some speculation online, it’s highly unlikely that Fox News was trying to engineer a closer result in order to drive coverage about the race “tightening.”
Though Andrew Sullivan and Marc Ambinder have correctly pointed out that the partisan balance of Fox’s poll is a good reason to discount its overall reflection of voter intentions — since it appears too many Republicans were interviewed — there’s no reason to believe that Fox came by its data via anything but traditional polling methodology.
The devil is in the verbs. “Sampling” is the process of selecting and getting responses from polled individuals. There’s chance involved in this. In conducting a random sample, sometimes more women respond to the calls or interviews than men.
Sometimes more Democrats respond than Republicans. “Weighting” is a pollster’s term for taking a random sample of respondents and then adding additional weight to certain individuals in order to bring them proportionally in line with the broader population. Gender, race and age are examples of random variables that many pollsters “weight.”
But partisan ID is not traditionally weighted by most pollsters. The Huffington Post wrote about this practice earlier this year — during a span in which a great number of polls seemed to have over-sampled Republicans without correcting for the data on the country’s partisan makeup via “weighting.”
John Zogby, something of a polling maverick, weights his polls to achieve a steady partisan balance from survey to survey. Gallup, by contrast, does not weight its respected daily tracking poll in order to make it come into line with the partisan breakdown that its own research tells the firm to be true. That’s the same practice among most pollsters, including, it would appear, the Fox poll.
However, that doesn’t mean that any individual unweighted poll can’t be drastically out of line with any number of demographic realities in the country. In polling-nerd lingo, this is called the “confidence level,” or the chance that any one poll accurately reflects the pool of individuals it is attempting to sample. Most scientific polls carry a 95% confidence level — thus meaning that there’s a 1 in 20 chance that any one poll is completely screwy, for any number of reasons.
Emory University political scientiest Alan Abramowitz wrote to the Huffington Post about the Fox poll, and he clearly thinks it’s an unreliable outlier.
“If you believe this poll, Democratic voters are less interested in the election than Republican voters and the likely voter pool is almost evenly divided between Democratic and Republican identifiers: 41% Democratic, 39% Republican,” Abramowitz said.
Gallup’s own tracking of the partisan balance in the American electorate currently has Democrats enjoying a 11-point advantage over Republicans (including the “leaners” on both sides). That’s in line with the conventional wisdom, which also takes into account the Democrats’ edge in voter registration.
Given those data points, any random sample in a poll — whether taken by Fox or any other news organzation — that shows a mere 2-point edge in partisan identification for Democrats should probably be discounted to some degree.
And until more pollsters are willing to start weighting their surveys to reflect party identification, those will just be the breaks (approximately once out of every 20 polls taken). Meantime, it might help if media outlets sponsoring polls were more up front about the potential holes in their surveys. But given the amount of money poured into each poll, that might be too much to hope for. ++
Election Protection
Amy Goodman, TruthDig via CommonDreams
Thursday, October 30, 2008
Election Day approaches, and with it a test of our election system’s integrity. Who will be allowed to vote; who will be barred? Who will get paper ballots; who will use electronic voting machines? Will polls be open long enough to accommodate what is expected to be a historic turnout?
Veteran activist Harvey Wasserman has co-written four books on elections and voter rights. He says John Kerry won Ohio in 2004. Why look back? Wasserman is concerned about the attempt by the Ohio Republican Party, with help from the Bush White House, to challenge the registration of new Ohio voters:
“The GOP is trying to disenfranchise these 200,000 people by challenging their right to vote, asking the secretary of state here, Jennifer Brunner, to let the counties investigate and knock off the voter rolls, if they choose to, people who have minor discrepancies in their Social Security numbers or driver’s license numbers. And the secretary of state has rightfully showed that many of these mistakes come from typographical errors when the numbers are entered in at the agencies.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that only the U.S. Department of Justice can purge these new registrants from the voter rolls. Republican House Minority Leader John Boehner, of Ohio, and President Bush urged U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey to take action, potentially purging these 200,000 people. Advocates feared the homeless in Ohio would be disenfranchised because they lack a traditional address or identification (Wasserman notes that many of them may be veterans). U.S. District Judge Edmund Sargus ruled that Ohio counties must allow voters who list their addresses as park benches or other non-building locations.
Wasserman’s two main concerns about the integrity of the election are mass disenfranchisement through computerized purging and the failures of electronic voting machines, which can skew vote tallies and cause impossibly long lines at polling places (as can the provision of too few voting machines, whether they work well or not). These issues are both coming to a head in Colorado. There, Secretary of State Mike Coffman, a Republican who is also running for Congress, has been sued by Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota and the Service Employees International Union for purging 30,000 voters within a 90-day window before an election. Six thousand seven hundred new registrants were purged for failing to check a box on the voter-registration form. Colorado has seen enthusiastic participation in early voting (some estimates nationally put the number of early voters at an astounding 10 million, with days to go), and also has seen many voters opt for mail-in ballots. However, more than 11,000 voters in Denver did not receive their mail-in ballots because of a mistake made by Sequoia Voting Systems, the company that was supposed to have delivered 21,000 ballots to a Denver mail-processing facility on Oct. 16. Election officials promise the ballots will be delivered.
Brad Friedman of BradBlog.com told me: “Sequoia is one of the big-four voting-machine companies. Of course, they have failed in state after state.” Friedman also reports on “vote flipping,” a problem with electronic, touch-screen voting machines. “It’s West Virginia, it’s Tennessee, it’s Texas, Missouri, Nevada … people go in and vote for a Democratic straight-party ticket or for Barack Obama, and the vote flips to a Republican or some other candidate.” The companies claim the machines can be calibrated to work properly. Friedman disagrees: “These machines need to be pulled out, because even when they work, the problem is that there is absolutely no way to ever verify that any vote ever cast on a touch-screen machine like this has been recorded as per the voter’s intent.”
In response to video of Georgia early voters waiting eight hours, Friedman blogged: “Thank you to those voters who were willing to hang in there! Shame on you to those officials who set up this system that can’t even accommodate the limited numbers of early voters! God save us all next Tuesday. Stay strong and brave people!”
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People has sued Virginia’s Democratic governor, Tim Kaine, on the grounds that he is unprepared to deal with a massive onslaught of voters there Nov. 4. Virginia is not among the 31 states with early voting.
Thousands of lawyers and citizen-activists will be monitoring the polling places on Election Day. People are posting videos of election problems at videothevote.org. When you go to cast your vote, take a friend or neighbor, take your ID and take a camera as well. Election protection is everyone’s job. ++
Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.
Voting Rights of Thousands of Purged Colorado Voters Restored
Common Cause, Mi Familia Vote, SEIU - Alternet
October 30, 2008
An agreement reached late Wednesday before a federal judge in Colorado ensures that tens of thousands of Colorado voters illegally purged from the registration lists will have their votes counted.
The decision was hailed by voting rights and good-government groups in Colorado and nationwide as a victory for voters and a clear message that election officials must take the necessary steps to make sure ballots cast by eligible voters are counted.
“This is a great victory for working families in Colorado. This lawsuit was filed to protect voters and make sure no one will be turned away on Election Day,” said Grace Lopez Ramirez, Colorado state director of Mi Familia Vota, one of the plaintiffs along with Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and Common Cause. “Voters will be assured that their voices will be heard.”
Under the settlement between plaintiffs and the defendant, the Colorado Secretary of State, every wrongfully purged Colorado voter in question will be placed on a protection list that assumes their eligibility and guarantees that in the event they are given a provisional ballot on Election Day, county election officials will promptly verify their eligibility.
Any ballots cast by the purged voters contested at the county level will have to be reviewed by the Colorado Secretary of State as well as advocates for the purged voters — rather than be discarded and not counted, as often happens with provisional ballots — in order to make sure all eligible votes are counted. If the Secretary elects to reject the ballot, representatives of the plaintiffs will also have the opportunity to review the registration and contest any rejections of wrongfully purged voters.
Additionally, the court will retain continuing jurisdiction over the tens of thousands of voters wrongfully purged, which allows plaintiffs to go directly to the judge to swiftly resolve any disputes and guarantee votes are properly counted.
This stipulation means that the purged Colorado voters in question will get at least three layers of protections — by the county, state, plaintiffs’ representatives and, if needed, a federal judge — an unprecedented degree of oversight to ensure that all eligible votes are counted.
“This settlement provides unprecedented protections to the voters of Colorado and ensures that the ballots of voters who were erroneously purged will be accurately counted,” said Penda Hair of the Advancement Project.
“This is a real victory for all of us and particularly the wrongfully purged voters in Colorado. Most of these voters had no idea they’d been barred from the voting booth. Today, we all have assurance that their votes will count. It is a sweet and just victory,” said Jim Johnson, chair of the board of the Brennan Center for Justice and partner at Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP.
“This is a good outcome for Colorado voters and we are pleased that the Secretary of State worked with us to achieve this resolution. Going forward, the state must work to do better for its voters,” said Myrna Perez, counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Plaintiffs also noted on Thursday that the extraordinary relief granted to Colorado voters just six days before the election is only a first step to improving Colorado’s purge practices. After the election, plaintiffs will continue to work to change Colorado’s procedures to improve protections for all voters.
~ To read the stipulation agreed to before U.S. District Judge John Kane, click here [open link.]
BACKGROUND ON THE CASE
The complaint was filed on behalf of Colorado Common Cause, Mi Familia Vota and Service Employees International Union (SEIU) contending that, in an action not required by any Colorado law, the Secretary of State has removed tens of thousands of voters from the official voter rolls. The move was a violation of the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA), which bans systematic removal of voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election except for narrowly specified reasons.
Civic groups brought substantial evidence that during the NVRA’s 90-day no-purge period, defendant Secretary of State actually removed approximately 30,000 voters’ registration records from Colorado’s voting rolls, in addition to the 1,892 whose removal may have been permitted under the NVRA because of death, incarceration for a felony or withdrawal.
Several thousand eligible voters have also been removed from the voter registration list due to a Colorado law that requires cancellation of new registrations when a non-forwardable notice sent by mail to the voter is returned as undeliverable within 20 days of receipt of the registration application. A similar law in Michigan was recently found by the U.S. District Court to be in violation the NVRA and unenforceable.
The plaintiffs were represented by the Advancement Project; Brennan Center for Justice; Debevoise & Plimpton, LLP Altshuler Berzon, LLP; Fair Elections Legal Network and Richardson Rosenblatt & Associates, LLC.
All of the parties to the complaint urge voters to “know before they go” to the polls and to vote early if possible to ensure that any problems are flagged early and to reduce pressure on polling places on Election Day… ++
Voting Rights Watch: Florida no-match list grows to 12,165 voters
SouthernStudies
GOP suddenly worried Dems could hold 60 Senate seats
David Goldstein, McClatchy Newspapers
Thursday, October 30, 2008
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
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