Slashdot Mirror
Daily Kos Pollster Made Up Numbers
jamie found a story up on Daily Kos revealing that the polling firm they had contracted with for 18 months, Research 2000 or R2K, apparently made up or at least manually tweaked its polling results. The blog published a preliminary report by a team of statistics gurus (Mark Grebner, Michael Weissman, and Jonathan Weissman), and it is an exemplar of clarity and concision. The team reports, "We do not know exactly how the weekly R2K results were created, but we are confident they could not accurately describe random polls." Daily Kos will be filing a lawsuit against its former pollster. "For the past year and a half, Daily Kos has been featuring weekly poll results from the Research 2000 (R2K) organization. These polls were often praised for their 'transparency,' since they included detailed cross-tabs on sub-populations and a clear description of the random dialing technique. However, on June 6, 2010, FiveThirtyEight.com rated R2K as among the least accurate pollsters in predicting election results. Daily Kos then terminated the relationship. One of us (MG) wondered if odd patterns he had noticed in R2K's reports might be connected with R2K's mediocre track record, prompting our investigation of whether the reports could represent proper random polling. ... This posting is a careful initial report of our findings, not intended to be a full formal analysis but rather to alert people not to rely on R2K's results."
Or, the polling could be dead accurate, and the election results that are not correct.
Given todays political climate, it wouldn't be too big a stretch to see our 'politicians' rigging results. How many people have been asked outside the polling offices, who they voted for? How was that tracked? It would be interesting to know.
- Dan.
~ People that think they are better than anyone else for any reason are the cause of all the strife in the world.
It's the name you gave yourselves until you eventually found out to your dismay what it meant.
Now you're stuck with it.
Have a nice day.
Signed:
A traitor scum liberal douchebag going-to-hell-athist communist nazi socialist jew from Canada (or something) as described by the incessant idiocy on the Right.
--
BMO
Using a derogatory term to refer to someone else is still a form of ad hominem attack, and therefore tacky. Like Eddie Pinder said about the word "nigger": "it has no place is polite conversation".
At the end of the day, the word "teabagger" comes to represent the rancor and resentment that liberals feel against their opponents. One need look no further than the fact that the term has been popularized by left-leaning media outlets (I'm looking at you, Olberman) to realize that its original intent has been perverted (please excuse the intentional pun).
Personally, I thought it was a hell of a lot better when they were just called "Libertarians".
I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.