Update on Exit Poll Results

On Feb 11th, I spoke with the Women for Kansas Cowley County (W4K-CC) Meeting.  We discussed the results of the exit poll they had run on Nov. 8th.

I discovered that the Cowley County Paper Ballot Official Results are not a apples-to-apples comparison as they are in Sedgwick County.  Those results are not suitable for inclusion in my analysis.

They are not the only dataset found to be unsuitable for inclusion.  I have removed that dataset from my upcoming peer-reviewed publication.   I have decided to leave my original blog post unchanged while updating my post discussing excluded data.

I understand why people don’t pay attention to statistics.  They can easily be twisted to yield any result desired by management.  That happened in Flint Michigan.

On the other hand, there are legitimate reasons to eliminate data when it is found to be unreliable.  The Cowley County are such an instance. The numbers given include main in ballots cast in those precincts.

Another reason I have chosen to leave the original graphs up is that they nice demonstrate the difference in pattern between a randomly introduced source of variation and a consistent bias which is evidence of fraud.

Cowley County results had me scratching my head.  The machine results showed trends similar to Wichita.  The paper ballots showed only large errors, but benefiting a random scattering amongst the candidates and races.  If you are interested in this sort of analytical details, feel free to go through the charts and decide for yourself.  I can’t rule out fraud for that dataset, but I don’t know what caused the deviations.  If it was fraud, it was either mercenary selling votes to any candidate or multiple agents working at cross purposes purhaps?  But given that the data collection limitations imposes greater variability which would result in the pattern of errors we see in those graphs, fraud is not be the most probable cause for those deviations.

Datasets are sometimes tainted by problems that have nothing to do with the question being asked but due solely to constraints on the data available.  There are limitations imposed by the methods of both the official results  and the exit poll survey.  I’m publishing ALL of the raw data, as well as as detailing what data is excluded and why.  Anyone who cares to may look at what is being left out as well as decide for themselves if the reasoning for the exclusion is sound.  With the exception of the Cowley County data, the other excluded datasets tend to support the fraud hypothesis.