Reply #148: With regard to your two answers

[Time for change]

I don't find them very convincing, for the following reasons, so I would appreciate if you could clarify your answers:

1. With regard to my first question, you state "E-M actually does provide evidence, but it is circumstantial ..." But you don't say what that evidence is. I read his report and I found NO evidence to support the shy Bush voter hypothesis. Neither did USCV. If you maintain that he did provide such evidence, please state what that evidence is.

With regard to your statement that non-response bias is a major problem in any survey, you are over-stating that point. Non-response bias is a POTENTIAL problem in any survey. It isn't necessarily a problem, and certainly not to the degree that Mitofsky proposes it to be in his 2004 exit polls. True, it always does need to be considered as an hypothesis. But Mitofsky doesn't state it as an hypothesis, he states it as a fact. Tell me that that isn't intellectually dishonest.

And with regard to your statement that E-M polls have shows significant bias (and by "bias" I assume that you are talking about the discrepancy between the exit polls and the official results) every year since 1988, please point out that the discrepancy between the E-M exit polls and the official results were greater in 2004 than in any previous year.

2. In response to my questioning Mitofsky's refusal to release his raw data (which could settle many of the arguments between him and USCV and provide the American people with a more thorough understanding of what went wrong with the 2004 election), you bring up the need to maintain the confidentiality of the respondents. In my line of work (epidemiology) we regularly deal with raw data where subject identifiers has been removed so as not to compromise the confidentiality of their responses. Are you saying that that is not possible to do in this case?