Reply #40: Exit Polls--It's the Pattern in the Red Shift, not Just the Fact of it...

[jwmealy]

Hey,

This is my first posting to this group. Thanks for your analyses of exit poll discrepancies.

I have an independent analysis that I think addresses all the "Repuke" explanations you quote, and others as well.

See http://www.selftest.net/redshift.htm for the data and charts (MSExcel html format) of results.

The following chart encapsulates the thesis:



A summary of my analysis and results is below.

"THE BIGGER THE PRIZE, THE BIGGER THE DISCREPANCY"
Since we know that votes can be hacked at different stages of the casting and tabulation process, it was more interesting to me to look at the amount of Red Shift in relation to whether a state was a “contested state”, than it was to look at voting technology (e.g. touch-screen) versus Red Shift.
In general agreement with Jonathan Simon's results, I found that there was an average 2.49% Red Shift in the “contested states”, versus an average 1.72% Red Shift in the non-“contested states”. These results show that there was 45% greater, or nearly half again as much, Red Shift phenomenon in those states than in "safe" states. That’s a very suspicious difference.
That led me to ask, Is there any correlation between those contested states that went for Bush, on the one hand, and those with higher Red Shift numbers, on the other hand? I discovered no obvious correlation.
What I did discover was a dramatic correlation between those contested states that commanded the most electoral college votes, on the one hand, and those contested states with the most Red Shift, on the other hand. If I were trying to fix a vote, I’d surely put more of my efforts where there was the most to gain and to lose. Out of the 11 contested states, 10 had Red Shifts towards Bush, and Wisconsin alone of the 11 had a very slight Kerry-ward shift. The electoral college votes represented by the five contested states with the greatest Red Shift was 82, whereas the electoral college votes represented by the five contested states with the least Red Shift was 43. That’s 1.91 times as many electoral college votes commanded by the five contested states with the greatest Red Shift.
When I did the same analysis on all 50 states for which data was available, grouping them into the 25 with the greatest Red Shift and the 25 with the least Red Shift, I found that the top 25 Red Shift group commanded 18% fewer electoral college votes than the bottom 25. This trend is in the opposite direction of the trend among the contested states.
Frankly, I can’t readily think of any hypothesis other than electoral fraud to explain why the Red Shift phenomenon should be significantly greater in contested states, and, above all, why it should be dramatically greater, the more electoral college votes a contested state commands.

I'd appreciate any constructive criticism, and/or offers of statistical support--I'm not a statistician.
Best Regards,
Webb Mealy