On “Smackdowns” and Fraud

May 11, 2005October 1, 2019 Mark Blumenthal22 Comments

The big news at the newly minted Huffington Post is that two of its "celebrity" bloggers have taken up the exit-polls-as-evidence-of-vote-fraud debate. What’s remarkable about yesterday’s exchange between ABC sportscaster Jim Lampley and National Review Correspondent Byron York (here, here and here, to say nothing of the pat-self-on-back praise by standup comic Robert George) is how devoid it is of fact. The Huffington Post has a long blog roll (that kindly includes MP), yet Lampley and York demonstrate little awareness of what others have said about this issue since November. Their "smackdown" includes a lot of impressive name calling but nary a link to the ongoing debate.

Consider this paragraph from Lampley’s initial post: He sees evidence of fraud in the fact that the "extremely scientific" Las Vegas oddsmakers, having presumably consulted the leaked exit polls, set Kerry as the favorite. He continues:

It is damned near impossible to go to graduate school in any but the most artistic disciplines without having to learn about the basics of social research and its uncanny accuracy and validity. We know that professionally conceived samples simply do not yield results which vary six, eight, ten points from eventual data returns, thaty’s why there are identifiable margins for error. We know that margins for error are valid, and that results have fallen within the error range for every Presidential election for the past fifty years prior to last fall. NEVER have exit polls varied by beyond-error margins in a single state, not since 1948 when this kind of polling began.

Wow. I’m guessing there are a few grad school instructors who may want to assign that paragraph to their students. How many problems can you identify?

Jim, some advice: You might want to put that degree to good use and browse a bit here (read these two closely) or perhaps just jump to the end (here and here) and consider where the debate is now. Note the use of links throughout to source material like this report from the exit pollsters themselves or the one criticizing it here. Bloggers do a lot of this.

What is ironic about the Lampley-York "smackdown" is that it comes on the same day an official investigation actually uncovered true evidence of fraud, though perhaps not the variety that Lampley imagines. Yesterday, an appointed task force in Milwaukee that included a Republican appointed U.S. attorney, a Democratic county district attorney, the FBI and the Milwaukee police found what everyone seems to agree is "clear evidence" of fraud. The AP published a widely distributed story, but Greg Borowski of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, ~~the newspaper~~ whose own reporting led to the official investigation, provides the must-read coverage. Read it all.

According to the JS story, the true evidence of fraud comes from "200 cases of felons voting illegally and more than 100 people who voted twice, used fake names or false addresses or voted in the name of a dead person." All of these were found in the city of Milwaukee, where John Kerry received 71.8% of the vote (up from 67.6% in 2000).

It is, of course, theoretically possible that such fraud may have benefited either side, but the Democratic stronghold of Milwaukee is not exactly the place one expects to find padding of the Republican vote. Presumably that is why Republican officials used the news to push a photo ID requirement for voting.

It is worth noting that the officials saw no evidence of a widespread conspiracy. Quoting the AP story:

Investigators did not uncover any proof of a plot to alter the outcome of the hotly contested presidential race in Wisconsin’s largest city and have filed no criminal charges.

"There is not the evidence of an overriding conspiracy in all of this," U.S. Attorney Steven Biskupic said.

Instead, the task force reported "widespread record keeping failures and separate areas of voter fraud." Biskupic said the faulty records will make it tough to prosecute many of the crimes, although he will file charges if he thinks he can prove wrongdoing in any cases.

Thus, the Milwaukee investigation appears to offer even more evidence of the sort of sloppiness associated with the random "reporting error" MP described recently. Consider these examples from Borowski’s article:

The city’s record-keeping problems meant investigators from the FBI and Milwaukee Police Department have logged more than 1,000 hours reviewing the 70,000 same-day registration cards, including 1,300 that could not be processed because of missing names, addresses and other information.

Indeed, about 100 cards described as "of interest to investigators" cannot be located, officials said. And within the past few weeks, police found a previously lost box of the cards at the Election Commission offices…

The newspaper also identified numerous cases in Milwaukee where the same person appears to have voted twice, though that analysis was hampered by major computer problems at the city.

Those problems, which city officials labeled a "glitch," meant hundreds upon hundreds of cases where people are incorrectly listed as voting twice. These are in addition to cases of double voting identified by investigators.

Apparently, mistakes happen. A lot.

Until Republicans and Democrats find a way to agree to clean up the process, cynicism about the fairness of the count will continue.

UPDATE: I should probably take back "devoid of fact" with respect to the Byron York half of the "smackdown." His latest reply to Lampley in the thread catches up to the state of the debate as of about mid-January, and includes a quote from a certain blogger/pollster you may recognize.

[Hat tip to reader Rick Brady for emailing links to the original Lampley post and the AP story]

Mark Blumenthal

Mark Blumenthal is the principal at MysteryPollster, LLC. With decades of experience in polling using traditional and innovative online methods, he is uniquely positioned to advise survey researchers, progressive organizations and candidates and the public at-large on how to adapt to polling’s ongoing reinvention. He was previously head of election polling at SurveyMonkey, senior polling editor for The Huffington Post, co-founder of Pollster.com and a long-time campaign consultant who conducted and analyzed political polls and focus groups for Democratic party candidates.