With the apparently unreasonable hope of being represented, sane conservatives & millions of progressives who were disenfranchised by the “democratic” party are now choosing to support third party presidential candidates, despite the fact that the “winner-takes-all” electoral college has stacked the deck against them. Faced with the two most disliked candidates in history & with nearly half of the US identifying as independents, there is enough support for alternatives like Jill Stein & Gary Johnson to put them on the ballot in nearly every state. Though both of them have access to enough electoral votes to make them viable options & a majority of the US want to hear from third parties in the debates, the Commission on Presidential debates (CPD) has not invited them to participate.

But why?

Why Stein & Johnson Allegedly

Didn’t “Qualify” for the Debates

The CPD’s “nonpartisan criteria for selecting candidates to participate” are that a candidate must be eligible to become president, they must be on the ballot in enough states to be capable of winning, & they must prove that voters support them by polling at 15% or higher. Sounds reasonable, right?

Almost.

The problem is that the CPD gets to handpick the 5 polls that are used to determine whether 15% of voters support them or not. Now, a reasonable person might assume that they’d pick transparent, unbiased organizations to conduct high-quality polls, especially since they’re a non-profit raking in millions from undisclosed donors to do this exact thing. Instead, they chose the #!@%ing corporate-media. Yes, the 5 polls are conducted by the same jerks who gave Donald Trump about $2 Billion dollars in free media attention — ABC-Washington Post, CBS-New York Times, CNN-Opinion Research Corporation, Fox News, & NBC-Wall Street Journal, all of which contain at least one of Hillary Clinton’s major campaign-donors. Which doesn’t sound corrupt at all.

But wait — it gets even better!

A Closer Look at the CPD’s “Polls “

After hearing that neither Stein nor Johnson had been invited to the debates because they hadn’t polled high enough, I decided to investigate their polls myself & spent the next few days analyzing them. Out of 5 polls, I was only able to locate 4 (NBC-WSJ doesn’t appear to have done any national polls, recently) and, out of 4 polls that I could find, 3 may have potentially serious methodology issues but are unacceptably non-transparent & 1 was transparently problematic. Before we dive into the problems, however, I’d like to explain what a good poll should look like…

How Polls Work: Sample-size, Subgroups, & Weighting

A scientific poll or survey uses data from a sample of the population to learn about the whole, which is super-useful because it’s usually impossible to ask everyone the same question. A good survey has an adequate sample size — basically, the larger a sample is (compared to the population), the more accurate a poll will be. For an accurate poll, 1,000 responses are usually enough — but those responses need to be usable! If we conduct a survey to to find out whether people like a film or not, it would make no sense to include the responses of those who hadn’t seen the film. For that reason, polls often divide the original sample into sub-groups.

It’s also important that a sample is similar to the population. Weighting a poll is the practice of adjusting the data to match the population’s demographics and studies show that (if properly done) weighting increases a poll’s accuracy. For example, if a sample was 60% male & 40% female but we know the overall population is 50-50%, the results will be skewed. To solve this problem, we can adjust the data so that the females’ responses are a bit “heavier” than the males’ — the same thing can be done to match a population’s race, age, or income demographics.

Lastly, I’d like to talk about transparency. The difference between science & garbage is that science always shows its work! In order for us to take a claim seriously, the one making the claim must provide evidence for their claim & explain how others can gain access to that evidence. This is why every research paper needs to include an explanation of the methodology used to produce the research — if it doesn’t, then it isn’t research.

The CPD’s 5 Crummy Polls

The Fox “News” Poll:

Transparent but Deeply Flawed

Predictably, the Fox “News” poll was the worst, though I must reluctantly credit them for being the most transparent. Only 21% of its base sample identified as independents but they weighted that down to 19%. That is a very obvious problem because 4 in 10 voters are independents and exit-polling from both 2008 & 2012 shows that they made up about 30% of voters, though it will likely be even higher in 2016 (since there are more independents, now). Not only is the sample unrealistic but it’s almost guaranteed to deflate third parties’ numbers.

Because the other 3 polls utterly failed to provide enough information about their methodology, it’s impossible to tell how they’ve arrived at their numbers. I’ve reached out by writing emails to all 3 of them but only the Washington Post has responded & only to politely tell me that they wouldn’t give me any information on their models. Nonetheless, there are certain things we can discover using logic…

The CNN-ORC Poll:

Young People Don’t Matter, Right…?

The CNN-ORC poll, for example, apparently decided it wasn’t important to include a significant sample of voters aged 18-34. If you examine the “cross-tabs” section, you’ll see they include a breakdown of subgroups that are less accurate because the margin-of-error (“MoE”)† increases in smaller sample sizes. CNN included subgroup results that had a MoE less than ±8.5% but the 18-34 year-old subgroup didn’t qualify — which means the overall responses of young people is as much as 8.6% different than this poll shows, though the MoE could be much higher. No one but CNN knows how large the error may be — but we know for certain that the best-case scenario is that their numbers are likely to be within 8.6% of the truth.

The ABC-Washington Post Poll :

Deceptively Worded & Non-Transparent

The Washington Post was the only one that returned my email, so they get 1 point for that. As for the poll itself, the first thing I’ll point out is that they claim a sample size of 1,002 & a MoE of ±3.5% at the top of the poll but, if you scroll to the bottom of the PDF, you’ll notice the fine print shows there were only 842 registered voters with a ±4% MoE, which they further narrowed to 642 “likely voters” with a ±4.5% MoE. Sneaky — but no match for a critical thinker with 10 seconds to spare.

The poll doesn’t fully explain how it was weighted, what the demographics are, or how they got from 842 registered voters to 642 “likely voters” and, when I asked about it, they refused to give me any information. This is a problem because they literally could have weighted it however they wanted — which means the results could be whatever they want. By definition, polls like these are not scientific & there is no way to verify whether they are being fair or not. Methodology for creating a subgroup of “likely” voters would be straightforward (& probably really boring) but they’re protecting it as if it were the closely-guarded recipe for their secret-sauce.

Lastly, I’d like to note that the ±4.5% MoE means that Gary Johnson may actually have 15%, according to this poll. However, because this poll is utterly unverifiable, it all comes down to whether you trust ABC & the Washington Post.

The New York Times-CBS Poll:

Impossible Numbers

Though it was probably the best poll of all 4, the NYT-CBS poll had all of the same transparency issues with their “likely voter” model, weighting, & demographic data — making it unverifiable & unscientific. Whatever the models were, however, we know they don’t reflect the population they’re supposed to be surveying because nearly 60% of the poll’s registered voters voted in the primaries! This is impossible because (as I wrote in June) a mere 61 million voters voted in the primaries & there are currently 146 million registered voters…

61 ÷ 146 = 0.41

Which means that the NYT-CBS poll’s projection has created about 25 million people who are most likely democrats or republicans (since they voted in the primaries) & also probably don’t exist. These kinds of impossible distortions sometimes occur when weighting procedures are executed poorly — but, of course, there’s no way to know because we’re not allowed to know their methods.

In addition to including non-existent primary-voters, the sample appears to have been drawn from a population that contains about 11% fewer independents than reality does. All in all, this poll has about as much merit as the ABC-Washington Post poll — which is none.

Why Stein & Johnson

Really Didn’t Qualify

Upon closer inspection, it appears that Jill Stein & Gary Johnson aren’t being excluded from the presidential debates because they failed to prove that voters support them in the polls — they didn’t qualify to debate because these polls aren’t capable of measuring support for Jill Stein & Gary Johnson. If the CPD cared about how many Stein or Johnson supporters exist or what they thought, they would have spent some of their millions of dollars on conducting actual research — and, if they cared about the 76% of us who believe third parties that qualify to be on enough states’ ballots to win should get to debate, then Jill Stein & Gary Johnson would be invited to debate.

To Sum It All Up

And there you have it — the Commission on Presidential Debates, like the corporate “news” networks, is nothing but another private organization, run by the 2 state-backed parties & funded by the 1% to control public opinion, marginalize dissent, & maintain the status quo.

Stein & Johnson haven’t performed well enough in their “polls” because they aren’t polls, they’re propaganda — and the “results” are about as real as Donald Trump’s tan or Hillary Clinton’s memories of being under sniper-fire & about as legitimate as the “results” of the “democratic” presidential primaries…

In solidarity,

John Laurits

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P.S. Regardless of who you’re voting for, if you want third party candidates like Jill Stein & Gary Johnson to have the opportunity to debate, you should sign the petition to the CPD by clicking here, which is already already over 100k — help it get to 200k!

P.P.S. If you’re a Twitter-er, RT this tweet calling out the CPD on their official account:

Hey, Commission on Presidential @debates! Why have the corporate-media do your polling instead of real researchers? https://t.co/1kFHyKAtnY — John Laurits (@JohnLaurits) September 22, 2016

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Note on margin-of-error: No poll will ever be 100% accurate — that’s just how it works when you’re trying to learn about a large population by using a small sample. A poll’s margin of error is expressed using the symbol “±” meaning “plus or minus,” followed by a %. A “margin of error of ±5%” means that statistically the numbers will be within 5% of the reality, 95% of the time (or 1/20th of the time). A MoE of ±2% is accurate within 2%, 95% of the time — statistically, if we conducted that same survey 20 times, we’d expect the survey to be off by more than 2% just one of those times.

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