I've found a blatant falsehood in a New York Post article:
Are poll workers being used to inflate jobs totals?, New York Post.
Workers at polling places for today's primary and November's general election are being required to file tax withholding forms for the first time ever in a move that could be aimed at inflating the nation's employment numbers.
In the above article Mr. Crudele says that Democrats will try to inflate employment statistics by counting election workers as "employed." But, when I looked at the Department of Labor website to see if that was even possible, I found this page. It explains that poll workers are adjusted for along with other "seasonal fluctuations." Mr. Crudele of the New York Post is totally wrong! (email: jcrudele@nypost.com)
As mentioned earlier, the CES Program’s current implementation of seasonal adjustment controls for several non-economic calendar related fluctuations in the estimates. This is done with the inclusion of user-defined regression (or "dummy") variables...
Dummy File | Calendar Event Treated |
---|
Fdum8606.dat | 4 vs. 5 week effect |
Fdumpc96.dat | 4 vs. 5 week effect plus a special adjustment for the presence/absence of poll workers in local government |
Source: http://www.bls.gov/...
The entire premise of the article is false, but it still spreads fear and misinformation. This is really getting old.
Send an email to (jcrudele@nypost.com) and let him know that you are disappointed by his poor partisan reporting, fake election scam rumor-mongering and his sloppy disregard for even the most basic of facts!