The Volokh Conspiracy

[Jonathan Adler, June 13, 2006 at 3:10pm] Trackbacks

RFK Jr. & Election 2004 (Continued):

Robert F. Kennedy Jr's analysis of the 2004 presidential election results has been subject to withering criticism, but it continues to get positive attention, such as in this (subscription-only) New York Times column by Bob Herbert. Election law expert Bob Bauer is not impressed.

Meanwhile, Democratic pollster Marc Blumenthal continues his dissection of Kennedy's claims at Mystery Pollster, here and here.

Related Posts (on one page):

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therut:

What would one expect from Herbert and the NYT honesty?

6.13.2006 11:38pm

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Bruce Hayden (mail) (www):

RFK, Jr, is way over his head here and is off in la-la land. Exit polls are, by necessity, weighted, and how to weight them changes year to year as demographics, etc. change. So, Kennedy's proposition is essentially that the weighting used at the close of the polls to turn a thousand or so not-so-randomly selected pollees (since some demographics are more amenable to exit polling than others) into millions of predicted votes is more accurate than the actual vote counts. And one of his greatest moves apparently is to go back and reapply weighting to some actual vote counts. But he makes quite loose with margins of errors, and, indeed, seems to pull them out of thin air (according to Mark Blumenthal).

I loved the quoting of the "Fox News Analyst" who turned out to be Susan Estrich, that: "'Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,' a Fox News analyst declared, 'or George Bush loses'". Given that Kennedy and Estrich most likely run in the some of the same circles, this is esp. cute.

6.14.2006 1:38pm

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Andrew Hyman (mail) (www):

It's always seemed to me that the real funny business in Ohio during the 2004 presidential election was the highly questionable (but successful) effort of Democrats to keep Ralph Nader off the ballot. I think I'll start to whine about that. Here's a link to documents regarding the Democrats' successful effort to deprive Ohio voters of the ability to choose Nader instead of Kerry.

6.14.2006 3:35pm