Den Beste is back, and he's spotted something odd in poll results in the past few weeks.
In my opinion, the polls were being deliberately gimmicked, in hopes of helping Kerry. In early August it looks as if there was an attempt to engineer a "post-convention bounce", but it failed and was abandoned after about two weeks. But I'm not absolutely certain about that.The data for September, however, is clearly an anomaly. The data is much too consistent. Compare the amount of jitter present before September to the data during that month. There's no period before that of comparable length where the data was so stable.
The September data is also drastically outside of previous trends, with distinct stairsteps both at the beginning and at the end. And the data before the anomaly and after it for both Kerry and Bush matches the long term trendlines.
If I saw something like that in scientific or engineering data, I'd be asking a lot of very tough questions. My first suspicion would be that the test equipment was broken, but in the case of opinion polls there is no such thing. My second suspicion would be fraud.
In September, I think there was a deliberate attempt to depress Kerry's numbers, so as to set up an "October comeback". Of course, the goal was to engineer a bandwagon.
Watching CNN Inside Politics at the moment, Bill Schneider busy spinning an overwhelmingly postive Bush poll of the military into [paraphrasing] "just something the military is expected to do, but they really don't agree with the way the war is being fought".
Oh, and they're against the draft, too. We also learned that George Bush and John Kerry are against the draft, college students are against the draft, middle class Americans are against the draft, the elderly are against the draft, political analysts are against the draft, Europeans are against the draft and a poll of chimpanzees trained in sign language also indicated they are firmly against the draft get CoCo banana.
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Totally wrong! My poll numbers show that in fact chimpanzees are 98% for drafting Kerry and Edwards and sending them to Mars.
Posted by: Bradley at October 18, 2004 1:10 AMNever mind poll manipulation, how about all the voter fraud that is being reported. The breadth and scope of the shenanigans are breathtaking. Some guy was getting paid in crack cocaine for submitting dozens of fake voter registrations, for example.
Drudge, on his Sunday radio show, was beside himself with anger and astonishment at what is happening. All the reforms to registration and balloting which are supposed to make voting more "accesible" and "cost effective" are turning out to be trojan horses for vote fraudsters and manipulators.
Don't be thinking we are any better here in Canada. I heard some pretty fishy-sounding stories about things that happened at our advance polls in the last federal election. Let's just say, anything that makes it easier to vote also makes it easier to manipulate the system and commit outright fraud, especially in a close election.
An entire election doesn't have to be stolen either - all that has to happen is enough of a suspicion to be raised in enough people, voter confidence will be eroded, and then you can pretty much kiss your democracy goodbye.
I wonder how many seniors in Toronto stopped voting, over the Tom Wappel affair? As far as I know, there was never any explanation made of how he knew that old guy didn't vote for him. Even if it was fairly innocent, e.g. based on a phone poll, it can leave a real fear in people - "vote for me, or I'm gonna find out and then you can kiss your pension goodbye".
I heard the Drudge show on Sunday night too. The New York Times had over 50 front page stories on Abu Graihb... how much coverage have they given to this?