Rob Zaleski: Prof. says vote numbers don't add up

By Rob Zaleski   The Capital Times
December 8, 2004  

Surely there must be some logical explanation.

That's the first thing Steven Freeman thought the night of Nov. 2, after exit polls showing that John Kerry would win most of the key battleground states turned out to be wrong, and George W. Bush ended up being re-elected by nearly 3.5 million votes.

But after several days, it became obvious that no one in the mainstream media was investigating the bizarre discrepancy, says Freeman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. So he decided to conduct his own investigation.

"I just felt that the discrepancy ought to be explained - that people expect these exit polls to be accurate, and there's no good reason they shouldn't be accurate within statistical limits," he said in a phone interview Monday.

Either the exit polls were off or the count was off, says Freeman, who has a Ph.D. in organizational studies from MIT.
 

 
"And beyond that, every deviation was in the same direction" - showing more support for Kerry than the actual vote - "so I thought that ought to be explained as well. And the more I looked into it, the more interesting it was."

That's putting it mildly.

As various media - including this paper - reported last month, Freeman's findings have helped fuel speculation that the election wasn't exactly, shall we say, on the up and up. More specifically, Freeman concluded in a paper on Nov. 10 - a paper, by the way, he has revised twice since - that the odds of exit polls in the critical states of Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania all being so far off were roughly 662,000 to 1.

Three weeks later, Freeman says he stands by his findings. At the same time, he admits being flabbergasted by the response: More than 1,000 e-mails - a large percentage of which were shockingly mean-spirited, he says - and about 100 requests for interviews, most of which he's had to turn down.

(He's grateful, by the way, for the many positive e-mails he received from faculty members and students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Which, he acknowledged, is a big reason he granted my request for an interview. "Madison," he suggested, "is a lot like Philadelphia. I mean, the truth of it is, I don't know a single Bush supporter at this university.")

Freeman says his intent from the beginning was just "to generate some attention" about the discrepancy and to raise a legitimate question: What caused it? "But I didn't know it was going to generate such a reaction."

Granted, "every statistician is going to come up with a slightly different number," he adds. "But I really thought I was just stating the obvious. I don't think there's much to disagree with."

In fact, Freeman says, he expects that a second paper he'll be releasing this week will be far more controversial. That paper, he says, analyzes the different explanations given for the discrepancy - such as the contention by Republicans that Bush supporters disproportionately refused to respond to the pollsters.

That may well be true, Freeman says. "But, you know, nobody's provided any evidence of that."

Whatever the case, Freeman was feeling pretty darn good on Monday. Although the major media virtually ignored his paper when it first came out, CNN, USA Today and The Washington Post have all requested interviews in recent days, he says. What's more, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and former Democratic candidate Dennis Kucinich have both mentioned Freeman's paper while joining Green Party presidential candidate David Cobb in demanding a recount of the Ohio vote.

To be sure, not all political experts believe Freeman has performed a great public service. For instance, Ken Mayer, a UW-Madison political science professor, says he has seen Freeman's paper and believes it's flawed.

Yes, there was a discrepancy between some exit polls and the actual vote, Mayer says. The most likely explanation? "Statistical error or some sort of bias," which is actually quite common in such polls, he says.

"I have yet to see any credible evidence that there were irregularities in this election that would have had a material effect on the outcome. ... It's just not there," Mayer says.

He notes that Freeman claims it's the responsibility of the media, academia, polling agencies and the public to investigate voting irregularities.

That's true, Mayer says. "But we also have an obligation not to stoke the fires of conspiracy theories in the absence of real evidence."

Freeman says he hardly expects everyone to agree with him or to support his cause - not with the country as divided as it is. But he is happy that people are finally starting to debate this weird discrepancy that has never happened before in a U.S. presidential election.

And it's not just that nobody has figured out why it happened, Freeman says.

It's that "nobody was even trying to figure it out."