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Read other letters about this article
Thank you for responding to my critique, Mr. Manjoo. I appreciate that you took the time to participate in this discussion.
I must, however, disagree with your response to my initial point about Freeman's statistical anomaly (and your accusation that it is a straw man). You write:
"Right, Freeman's statistic points to *something* -- but everyone agrees it was *something*. Nobody is saying it was just chance. The argument is about which something it was: A polling error, or an error in the count? (And the number does not show that what happened was *deliberate* -- it shows that what happened was *systematic,* meaning essentially that it occurred in the same way in those three states.)"
Here, again, you are falsely framing the debate. You took my initial point -- that Freeman's statistic is meaningful, and not a straw man, because it shows the results in Ohio, Florida and Pennsylvania could not have happened by chance -- and you derive a false conclusion from this: namely, that Freeman's number means either there was "a polling error, or an error in the count."
As in your article, your are using a semantic slight of hand to suggest the statistical impossibility of the exit polls being as wrong as they were in those three states had to be a result of one of two forms of "error". All Freeman is saying is that the results could not have happened naturally ("by chance"). You may interpret the alternative as "systematic," but that's not the only possibility. The other possiblity is a combination of deliberate fraud and other means of vote suppression.
My point is, you are saying Freeman's study proves definitively that we have only two choices to explain the results in these 3 states: polling error, or count error. But Freeman's study only proves that the results were not natural. You have made claims for his study that his study does not make.
