From: Allin Cottrell (cottrell@WFU.EDU)
Date: Sun Apr 01 2007 - 11:33:19 EDT
It's hard to tell just how far the Bush Republicans have been willing to go in terms of domestic malfeasance (I don't speak of Iraq). Two questions have prompted a great deal of discussion on the internet, though not in the mainstream media: 9/11 (Was it staged by the National Security Agency?) and the 2004 election (Was it stolen? Were the exit polls that showed a significant Kerry lead about right?) Having spent more time than I should have, reading both sides of these stories on numerous sites and blogs, here, for what it is worth, are my "findings". 9/11: I'm not persuaded by the conspiracy theory. Such a project would not only have been totally devilish (possible, perhaps) but also fantastically risky, and the cover-up implausibly clever and complete. Given the burden of proof, the technical arguments for the impossibility of the official account seem to me lacking. I'm no engineer, but I get a sense of spurious certainty in the claims that the twin towers *could not have collapsed* due to the aircraft hits, and whatever flew into the Pentagon *could not have been* a civil airliner. They seem to rest on textbook physics applied without due regard to the margin of error in messy real-world situations. The rebuttals offered by Popular Mechanics seem to me reasonable. The 2004 election: On the face of it this is more plausible. Given the woeful state of US electoral law, this seems like something the Republicans could reasonably have expected to get away with. Furthermore, it wouldn't have required a tight centralized conspiracy, just a lot of Republicans "doing the right thing by their party" at the state and local levels. Steve Freeman of the University of Pennsylvania has made a very persuasive case that they did in fact steal the election. He argues that there's no way the discrepancy between exit polls and official tallies could have been due to random sampling error: either the polls were seriously biased or the results were cooked. But there's no evidence that the polls were biased. Most writers discussing this have said that the polls somehow underrepresented Republican voters. The interviewers are asked to question every Nth person exiting the polling station, but of course people are free to say No. If Republicans refused disproportionately that could account for the discrepancy, but there's no direct evidence this was the case: the only "evidence" is the very fact that has to be explained, namely the difference with the official result. Freeman points out that the details of the polling data actually suggest a slight discrepancy in the opposite direction, with Democrats likely to be somewhat underrepresented in the exit poll. Freeman shows that the biggest discrepancies occurred in strongly Republican precincts, where Republicans controlled the electoral machinery and Bush was winning a big majority anyway: on average in such cases Kerry was credited with about 2/3 of the vote that the exit polls say he got. Freeman also makes a good case that the pollsters themselves (who quickly disclaimed the idea that the discrepancy cast any doubt on the result) are not interested in "the truth" but simply in providing their media clients with the most accurate prediction of the official result. If the official result factors in Republican vote-switching, then the exit poll methodology has to be "corrected" to predict the effects of that! (This is in the US context; things are different when they're looking at elections in Mexico or Ukraine, where they don't have the maintained hypothesis that the official result is unassailable.) See http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/epdiscrep.htm I've read rebuttals of Freeman, but all the ones I found seem to be just hand-waving, with no substantive argument at the level of his investigations. Allin. -- Allin Cottrell Department of Economics Wake Forest University, NC
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