I came across this today
I came across this today
article in Salon.com claiming the evidence Kennedy cites "isn't new and his argument is filled with distortions and blatant omissions."
Here's Kennedy's
original piece from "Rolling Stone".
here is
Kennedy's response to the Salon piece.
so I dug deeper...
David Corn in "The Nation" (a leading leftist publication) has been following the stories on 2004 election and
finds no evidence it was stolen.
you want statistical data and analysis from the primary technical literature?
Professor here reviews the known extensive problems with exit polls (Kennedy asserts "exit polling has evolved into an exact science. Indeed, among pollsters and statisticians, such surveys are thought to be the most reliable."!! Ha!!) may be due to blurring of the partial microdata and differences in attribution of refusals. He suggests, along with Prof Melbane, to try second-digit Benford's Law distribution to test for fraudulent votes---thus avoiding the need for covariates in the usual regression based techniques for outlier detection.
Authors of this paper conclude:
Discrepancies between early exit poll results and popular vote tallies in several states may be due to a variety of factors
and do not constitute prima facie evidence for fraud in the current election.
? Recent studies noting disparities between
county registration rates and voting outcomes in Florida, as well as apparent "machine effects" favoring George W. Bush, are of limited significance and cannot be considered as evidence of election fraud.
? Ohio witnessed significant variability in
wait times in some districts, sporadic instances of machine malfunctions, and possible voting tabulation errors, undercounts, and overcounts. Based on data available to this working group, it is extremely unlikely that the absence of these irregularities would have shifted popular vote tallies sufficiently to change the declared winner in Ohio.
use your vorpal sword to cut
thru the data here and find that notorious Franklin county lines and missallocation of voting machines and long lines probably due to officials using spring data on active voters and not responding to surge in new ones thru the summer.
I would note the principal authors of these papers are from Berkeley.
The American Center for Voting Rights
mentions here the vote fraud coming from the other side,
"criminal investigations and news reports suggest.. that the [Democratic party] voter registration effort also involved the registration of thousands of fictional voters such as the now infamous Jive F. Turkey, Sr., Dick Tracy and Mary Poppins.
But turns out all this is nothing new for Kennedy. Last year he published a piece linking mercury in vaccines to autism, a piece containing
serious distortions and manipulations of fact.
