Salon.com has posted a front-page
rebuttal of Robert Kennedy Jr.s
Rolling Stone article (which alleges the certainty of result-changing fraud in the 2004 election).
Here's Farhad Manjoo's thesis:
Whatever his aim, RFK Jr. does not appear intent on fixing the problem. He's more content to take us through a hit parade of the most popular, and the most dismissible, theories purporting to show that John Kerry won Ohio, theories that have been swirling about the blogosphere ever since the race was called.
I knew upon reading the Rolling Stone article that the exit poll section was the weakest, relying on several studies (like Freeman's) that had been severely undermined when examined by experts in the field.
Farhad Manjoo goes through a point-by-point rebuttal of several of Kennedy's points. One that stuck out to me was the oft-repeated claim that exit polls are always reliable, and that the Ukranian exit poll was used to expose fraud, which means ours should have been as well:
"Nonsense," says Mark Blumenthal, the professional Democratic pollster who runs Mystery Pollster, the poll-scrutinizing blog that has comprehensively covered the exit poll story since Election Day. Anyone who says that exit polls are the most reliable kind of survey "only demonstrates that the person making that statement knows very little about how surveys are done," Blumenthal says.
Warren Mitofsky [...] says this of exit polling: "[...] The majority of exit polls carried out in European countries over the past years have been failures."
As the MIT political scientists Charles Stewart has pointed out, it's not useful to compare the role of exit polls in Ukraine's 2004 election with exit polls in the U.S race. The two elections, and the two nations, are too different to come to any meaningful conclusion from such a comparison. In Ukraine, one exit poll showed opposition candidate and eventual president Viktor Yushchenko winning 54 percent to 43 percent nationally. Mitofsky's final national poll put Kerry at 51 percent and Bush with 48 percent. Compare this to the actual result, which had Bush at 51 percent and Kerry with 48 percent. The difference is not that significant.
Exit polls are sometimes wrong; indeed, examples abound. In 1992, the exits showed almost as great a pro-Clinton bias as the 2004 poll's pro-Kerry bias -- in other words, the poll showed Clinton with a lot bigger win than he ultimately had. The reason that poll didn't cause a firestorm is because the race wasn't as close as the one in 2004.
I just wanted to point out - and here's where I feel like I am straining against the wind here. This is an article in salon.com, hardly a conservative publication. It's written by Farhad Manjoo, who has more often than not been an ally in the fight against the creeping Diebold infestation.
In a probably misguided attempt to guide the conversation here, I have a couple of questions.
What if it's true that the exit polls don't show proof of fraud? What if it's true that all the irregularities in Ohio don't add up to an amount that would have led to Kerry winning?
It seems that when people like me bring up objections to the various fraud arguments, there's a real anger that postulates that questioning the fraud conclusions are inappropriate by definition. It's as if bringing in facts that disprove the fraud conclusions are out of bounds, because it will reduce the likelihood that people will hear about the fraud conclusions. It's maddeningly circular.
So here is my question. And I mean this honestly. If result-changing fraud didn't occur, is it still in your best interests to convince the nation that result-changing fraud did occur? Is there a political upside to this? Is there some sort of guerilla marketing thing going on here, where convincing the nation of the perception of result-changing fraud is more important than communicating whether or not result-changing fraud actually did occur?
Finally... if it is possible that result-changing fraud did not occur in Ohio, then what does it say about the dkos community that there have been over 2000 comments in diaries about this over the last few days, with such an extraordinarily low occurrence of disagreement and debate? Should mutual reinforcement really have this much power over the questions of truth and accuracy?
Update: From one of the comments, here is more information on how the accuracy of exit polls can differ, depending on the exit poll and its region.