Hunting The Muse

Exit Polling, Continued - Freeman Study

For an excellent illustration of the exit polling controversy, as well as of the struggle for "political oxygen", check out this thread over at daily kos, and skim the comments. It even includes a discussion of whether fraud skeptics are republican plants.

The thread is about another study that supposedly shows how unlikely the vote count is compared to the exit polls. The study, by Steven F. Freeman, PhD of University of Pennsylvania, puts the odds at 250,000,000 to 1. It's misleading for many of the same reasons as the other study I discussed in my last entry.

Now, for the political oxygen part. One way to create more oxygen is to just agitate and create an incredible stink. That's the method I chose - halfway down the comments, I go ballistic on the community, shouting in all caps "THIS STUDY IS BOGUS!!" and writing in very short sentences.

It definitely got a lot of attention. People accused me of overstating my case, and they were right. And yet, I stand by the content of what I said, and given the same situation, I probably would have said it the same way. At least until I figure out a better way. But I think a qualified, reasonable listing of facts would have been glossed over and dismissed by the community.

People started making more mention of "Tunesmith's comments" in the rest of the thread, and people started requesting that the discussion be brought to the study author's attention. The author of the study has since made it known that while he received hundreds of email responses yesterday and about twenty calls from the press, he read the discussion, and is going to revise his study.