Dr. Mark Lindeman is an Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Bard College. In the wake of the 2004 Presidential election and strong concerns of vote fraud, Dr. Lindeman contributed significant analysis of the exit polls oft believed to be indicators of a stolen election. Using novel statistical techniques developed by Elizabeth Liddle, Dr. Lindeman concluded that the exit polls did not support a conclusion of widespread fraud. This was a controversial conclusion among the left and remains so to this day, despite a convincing analysis by Lindeman and Liddle. 

Dr. Lindeman graciously agreed to a series of interviews with me for Neural Gourmet in e-mail covering public opinion, the exit polls and why he doesn't believe that widespread fraud took place in November 2004.

Links to Part 2 and Part 3.

tng: I know I've said this to you in e-mail already, but I just want to thank you publicly for taking the time to do this. One of the things that makes thinking about the 2004 election and the exit polls so hard is the sheer volume of information out there, good bad and ugly. You've been absolutely wonderful in the amount of time and energy you've invested into talking with myself and others online about this topic, not to mention the professional and academic work you've done in analyzing the 2004 Presidential election exit polls. I know you've certainly contributed to my own understanding which has evolved from simple election fraud to a more complex view of structural issues involved with our elections sans proof of outright fraud.

So... just to get the ball rolling, what kinds of things interest you when you're not engaging in the debate over the 2004 election polls?

Mark: At Bard, I'm the only "Americanist" in the political studies program, and the students tend not to be as interested in quantitative work as I am. By teaching environmental politics, I get to work with a really lively mix of students, many of whom otherwise would prefer to ignore politics. (I think most of us would sometimes prefer to ignore politics!). I've always been interested in the relationship between policy and public opinion.  For instance, I wonder: is it true that U.S. climate protection policy is so weak because Americans love their cars so much? and -- a related but different question -- what sort of climate policy would most Americans support? Questions like this are tricky because most Americans don't ponder policy issues. Even if they did, a lot of survey questions are so general and superficial that they pretty much punish serious thought. For both those reasons, surveys generally don't tell us much about "what Americans really want."  You might say that we have sound-bite polling to match our sound-bite politics.

tng: I've often thought that way about the surveys one generally reads in the newspapers (and then they're badly reported on which complicates things even further). I know I really see this with the science and technology topics I have some knowledge in. Do you think Americans have enough and good enough information to reliably form their opinions on issues today? And are things better or worse off than in the past?

Mark: Well, of course I don't think they have enough, although I also think some folks get too down in the mouth about this. One thing to bear in mind is what political scientists call rational ignorance.  Most people aren't going to seek out detailed information on policy issues no matter how much is available, because for most of us, knowing 100 times as much about an issue doesn't make us appreciably more influential about it.  So we tend to form our opinions ramshackle out of facts (and "facts" that happen to be lying around. As far as I can tell, people tend to know about as much as they did in the past, and they aren't likely to learn much more.  The polarization over some basic facts about Iraq is pretty appalling. (For instance, in a PIPA back in the fall of 2003, 67% of Fox News viewers said the U.S. had "found clear evidence in Iraq" that Saddam Hussein was "working closely" with al Qaeda, compared to just 16% of respondents who got their news from PBS and NPR.)  But I suspect that if we could go back to the beginning of the 20th century, we would find some similar divides. I'm neither sanguine nor panicked.  Even the apparent contradictions in survey results have a silver lining: the U.S. isn't a country of monomaniacs.  We can keep our powder dry, we can see issues from different angles, and we can learn. We can also be manipulated.

tng: How do those interests carry over into your research?

Mark: I am interested in what I call deliberative research, which tries to get farther into the policy substance. Some deliberative research is much like conventional survey research except that it presents a wider range of questions, and often provides more information to the respondents.  Some is much more intensive, bringing together small groups to learn about and discuss an issue over days or longer.  Either way, the results often don't seem to jibe either with current policy or with a lot of conventional wisdom about public opinion. I have lots of thoughts about those apparent disjunctions.

tng: Would you like to give a couple of quick examples about these apparent disjunctions and your ideas about them?

Mark: Back in 1993 and '94, the conventional wisdom was that Americans said they wanted universal health coverage but weren't actually willing to pay for it. If you pressed people about the subject, they actually _were_ willing to pay for it. Ironically, it may actually have hurt the Clinton plan that people suspected they were being promised something for nothing.  Or maybe the classic example is the widespread belief that Americans hate foreign aid.  If Americans hate foreign aid, why did George W. Bush pledge billions of dollars to fight AIDS in a State of the Union address?  In one study, the median respondent said, 'The U.S. is spending too much on foreign aid -- maybe 10% of our budget. We should cut it back to 5%.' But the actual figure is more like 1%.  Americans could support much higher levels of foreign aid, provided they thought it would do some good.  On climate change, Americans seem ready to roll on a much stronger policy than the status quo; they just don't have the presence of mind to demand it. Unfortunately, elected officials can't afford (or don't think they can afford) to be guided by what Americans might say in some idealized discourse; they worry about the distorted talking points and negative advertisements that they are likely to encounter.  There's no neat solution to these problems, but I like to think that any sort of research that gives citizens the chance to talk like grownups might help political leaders to act like grownups.

tng: Well, let's hope there's a lot more of that research then because that certainly sounds like a good thing to me. How did you come to be interested in this whole debate about the exit polls and possible fraud in the 2004 election?

Mark: Right after the 2004 U.S. election, some students asked me about the possibility of massive fraud, and I didn't want to have just a perfunctory answer, so that's how I got started. I never imagined that I would spend so much time on the election.

tng: I'm really quite impressed with the amount of time and effort you put in talking about the exit poll debate and patiently explaining your position to people who are often actively hostile to your conclusions because, at least it seems to me, those conclusions don't jive with their expectations. Doesn't that ever drag you down, and why do you keep coming back for more abuse?

Mark: Oh, sometimes I get way too bitter and I just have to walk away for a while.  I don't mind hostility to my conclusions, but I really get mad when self-styled progressives insist on their views even if some of the facts are verifiably wrong and the arguments don't cohere.  I've made some good friends who are very skeptical of the election results.  In the face of incomplete information, opinions will differ -- and indeed, the U.S. election system right now provides too little information, so we all need to be skeptics.  It's the true believers who trouble me.  Maybe it's wonky of me, but I want "reality-based" to be one of our core values.

Election integrity is an important cause that deserves better than some of its strident self-appointed defenders have offered.  Attempts to circle the wagons around a stolen-election narrative are intellectually flawed and, I suspect, self-defeating to boot.  And some of the ad hominem attacks are just despicable and ought to be opposed.  Still, there are lots of good people doing good work.

tng: Even though you were reluctant to initially provide an answer to your students without looking at the actual data first, did you have any suspicions one way or the other? For instance, I know Elizabeth Liddle, who has also provided significant statisical analysis of the 2004 election exit polling, initially thought the exit polls indicated a stolen election but later came to think otherwise after working with the data.

Mark: Well, before the election I was generally on board with the arguments that Kerry was likely to pull the election out -- frankly, it was what I wanted to believe. And on election night, when I saw the Ohio exit poll results, I thought Kerry would win. Nevertheless, the day after the election, I thought that probably Bush had won.  I have viscerally never understood some people's belief that the exit polls had to be right -- that seems like a strange victory of scientism over common sense.  And as much as I wanted to believe otherwise, I always knew that defeating the incumbent was an uphill struggle.  So I was far from objective, but perhaps I was sufficiently ambivalent to keep myself approximately honest, as Elizabeth did.

Many of us wondered whether the exit poll discrepancies would turn out to be larger in places with DREs (electronic voting machines).  Soon after the election, Mitofsky reported that they hadn't been, which tended to infirm one broad category of fraud theory.  Also, within a few days after the election, I somehow got connected with Kathy Dopp, who was working on election returns from Florida.  I believe Kathy still thinks that her analysis points to vote miscount on Florida optical scanners, but I never did.  Not that I would be shocked to find vote miscount in Florida; I just didn't see good evidence there.

It hasn't all been a Long March of null findings. Probably the best solid example of vote miscount is the appalling undervote rate on pushbutton DREs in New Mexico, especially in Democratic precincts. (Elizabeth was among the first to point this out. It's really quite ironic, not to say maddening, that she is perceived as an election apologist.)  It is possible that the DREs actually altered the outcome there.  As to vote suppression -- i.e., cases where would-be voters never cast a ballot at all -- the allocation of voting machines in Franklin County, Ohio certainly cost Kerry thousands of votes, as did long lines elsewhere in the state.  Registration errors and purges must have cost many more votes.  Once one starts rattling off election defects, it's hard to stop.  I don't think they altered the outcome of the election, but I don't say that to trivialize them.

I do argue that many sweeping arguments asserting election theft are infirmed by the evidence.  For instance, people say over and over that the exit poll discrepancies were "larger" in swing states -- which is true if you parse the data the right way and then squint -- but the _largest_ exit poll discrepancies were in solid-blue states.  Honestly, I can't explain that (I do have a few half-baked hypotheses), but the true believers don't even seem to try. It's as if they aren't interested in their own evidence.  If one really believes that the exit polls were accurate, then one should be looking for massive numbers of stolen votes in New York and probably California.  Or, setting aside the exit polls, if one really believes that DREs were massively hacked, then presumably one should expect strikingly anomalous election returns in DRE jurisdictions, and I don't see them.

tng: That's the end of the first part of our interview with Mark Lindeman. We'll post part 2 tomorrow evening and part 3 should be posted on Wednesday.

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