You should all chew on this and let me know what you think: Iowa: Was the fix in? (a statistical analysis of the results):
Summary/TL;DR
Either the first precincts to report were widely unrepresentative of Iowa as a whole, or something screwy happened.
Interesting arguments among statisticians (and whoever else). General summary is either pretty much only Paul-supporting precincts were reporting for about the first 25%, or someone fudged the numbers later:
Conclusion
If my three assumptions are correct, the probability of observing partial results like we saw is extremely small. It’s much more likely that one of the assumptions is wrong. It could be that the early reports were wrong, though that seems unlikely. The other websites showed the same information or very similar, so it seems doubtful that an error occurred in passing along the information.
Was there something odd about the precincts that reported early? This is not something you could tell just by looking at split vs final data. The data clearly show that the later precincts disfavored Ron Paul, but that’s just what we want to know: did they really disfavor him, or was the data manipulated in some way. The question is, were any of the results faked, tweaked, massaged, Diebold-ed?
To answer that question, we’d need to know if these later precincts to report were expected, beforehand, to disfavor Ron Paul relative to the others. It would also help to look at entrance polling from all of the precincts, and compare the ones that were part of the early reporting versus those that were part of the later reports. At this point, I have to ask for help from you, citizen of the internet. Is this something we can figure out?
I disagree personally on both counts (somewhat), as I believe we merely saw the kick-in of Iowa GOP manipulation as more or less promised by Dee Dee Benkie the night before - the GOP was monitoring the vote and then deployed their swing voters accordingly when the course became obvious to steer it to the outcome they desired:
Regardless, I feel it was about the best possible outcome for Paul - statistically 2nd place, media heat off his back, Romney proven to be almost overshadowed by a long time single-digiter (only remaining non-Romney/non-Paul option is Huntsman: look for his bump coming soon when Santorum crashes) only blown up by the media the week or two before...
Fun times. Great place for Paul.
edit on 1/6/2012 by Praetorius because: (no reason given)
