Mark Lindeman is a guy who did the statistical analysis of the exit polls and final numbers of the 2004 election and conluded that there was NO fraud, or at least not enough to make a difference. He is, thus, a liberal unloved by some other liberals. He is thus a liberal unhappy that his data show what they show - he would have been much happier if Kerry won. But data are data....
Anyway, TNG of Neural Gourmet blog did an exclusive interview with Dr.Lindeman. The first part is now up, the second one will come up tomorrow and the third part on Wednesday.
So, go and read the first part now: Of public opinion, exit polls and fraud (or the lack thereof): An interview with Mark Lindeman (Part I):
I've always been interested in the relationship between policy and public opinion. For instance, I wonder: is it true that U.S. climate protection policy is so weak because Americans love their cars so much? and -- a related but different question -- what sort of climate policy would most Americans support? Questions like this are tricky because most Americans don't ponder policy issues. Even if they did, a lot of survey questions are so general and superficial that they pretty much punish serious thought. For both those reasons, surveys generally don't tell us much about "what Americans really want." You might say that we have sound-bite polling to match our sound-bite politics.
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Hey coturnix, thanks for linking to this. I was really happy with how this interview went and I think a lot of important topics were covered and answered in great detail by Mark. If anyone is interested the second part of the interview is up now and can be found here.
Hi coturnix,
I just thought your readers would be interested in the third, and final, part of the interview with Mark.
Thanks for promoting this. I think most people will come away from this series a little more knowledgeable than they went in.
http://www.geocities.com/electionmodel/TruthIsAllFAQResponse.htm
2004/2006 Election Fraud Analytics: Response to the TruthIsAll FAQ
Last Update: May 15, 2007 by TruthIsAll
Part I contains a comprehensive statistical analysis of 2004/2006 pre-election and exit polls. The 2004 National Exit Poll had Kerry winning by a steady 51-48% from 4pm (8649 respondents) to 12:22am (13047 respondents). But Bush won the 2pm Final NEP (13660 respondents) by 51-48%. In the Final, impossible weights and implausible vote shares were required to force a match to the recorded vote count. The True Vote Model determined that Kerry won the popular vote by 66.1-58.4 million (52.6-46.4%) and the electoral vote by 336-202.
In the 2006 midterms, the Democrats gained 31 congressional seats ? a solid victory. But they actually did much better than that. A regression trend analysis of 120 pre-election Generic polls (all won by the Democrats) projected they would win by 56-42% ? and gain more than 40 seats. The National Exit Poll at 7pm (55D-43R) confirmed the pre-election trend: a Democratic tsunami was taking place. But at 1pm the next day, the Final NEP used implausible weights and vote shares in order to once again force a match to the recorded vote count. The Democratic margin was cut in half to 52-46%. The fraud resulted in the loss of 10-20 additional seats.
To test the robustness of the models, a comprehensive set of sensitivity analysis tables display the effects of incremental changes in input assumptions on the true popular/electoral vote (i.e. pre-election polls: undecided voter allocation; post-election exit polls: timelines, demographic weights/vote shares; voter turnout; cluster effect, uncounted vote shares, etc.) Links to several Excel-based models are included for readers interested in entering their own scenario input assumptions in order to estimate the true vote by asking ?what-if?.
Part II contains the original ?Truth Is All FAQ? with my responses included. The author of the FAQ, Mark Lindeman, has tried to debunk the work of a number of independent researchers involved in the analysis of election fraud in 2004 and 2006. Mark has posted on the Democratic Underground as "On the Other Hand", on Daily KOS as ?Hudson Valley Mark? and numerous other forums whenever 2004/2006 pre-election and exit polls are discussed.
The TruthIsAll.pdf contains Nov. 1 2004 Election Model reports, analysis, graphs and methodology with links to relevant Democratic Underground posts. Since Sept. 2005, I have posted on the following forums: Progressive Independent, Thom Hartmann, Mark C. Miller, Bradblog, Buzzflash, RFK Jr. (Ring of Fire), Huffington Post, Pollster.com.