“Damn it! Somebody told the voters true facts they were not supposed to know!”
That said, this is not the way to conduct social science experiments.
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“”“As it turns out, the experiment was intended to measure whether receiving additional information about the candidates affected voter participation”""
Scientists…these guys are not. Of course receiving additional information will have an effect…its what politics is all about. They could not have been stupid enough to not see they were measuring an effect of voting by tampering with that voting. And did so with ‘their’ information. ( Heisenberg must be rolling over ) Politics is up to politicians…not young full of themselves academics. They study it…they don’t push it.
Jail them all.
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The RNC as I post is contacting the 3 young men to help out in the last few day’s of the 2014 campaign!
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I am not sure the Koch’s use the logos and icons of official entities in their efforts. These assholes intended to affect thinking by presenting their opinions ( who came up with the ideological assessments ) as official information. They were tampering with an election so they could measure the effects of their efforts.
As for blaming the duped for being duped that’s crap. Lots of folks spew that tough guy shit but never do when it is they that have been scammed.
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Perhaps a colleague can publish a bit on that.
There is also a US criminal law issue here. They used the US Mails to commit fraud, it can be alleged. And then there are various civil rights statutes invovlving voting implicated as a part of a conspiracy which are worthy of examination.
In criminal law, rank stupidity is not a defense but may be a factor to be considered when deciding a sentence.
Now Stanford and Dartmouth have to address the issue of academic fraud if they are to retain any credibility, and they have to do it very soon.
If either university “sanctioned” this action then they may have a problem with their future participation in any US contracts or programs for potential civil rights and postal fraud violations.
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Molt ballparked that the researchers had spent $80,000 on the project, since the flyer was mailed to 100,000 Montana voters, and offered that figure as a starting point for a potential “substantial” settlement.
So if you can float about $50K per judge and don’t mind the heat of scrutiny from the state government, you can meddle in judicial elections in Montana? That’s a pretty light fine for something that might reshape the state’s Supreme Court.
I imagine there are mining interests that would happily drop that kind of cash to the tune of 20-30 judicial elections throughout the interior Mountain West and Upper Plains states.
But hey, that corporate money is just people speaking their minds.
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The study was funded as part of a $250,000 grant from the Hewlitt Foundation, which Stanford matched with $100,000, according to the university.[quote=“system11111111111, post:1, topic:12169, full:true”]
Discussion for article #229294
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Whoever handles Foundation Relations at Stanford is having a really bad day today.
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“The primary question is going to be how the heck did they get the state seal on the thing?”
Then you’re asking the wrong questions.
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FAUX News will hire them!
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Questions Emerge About Potential Conflict of Interest Between Mailergate and Silicon Valley Start-up http://mtcowgirl.com/2014/10/26/the-worm-turns-in-mailergate-heres-the-latest/
Community colleges hell. The Kochs will send truck loads of money. These bastards are far more creative that Rove and probably charge a lot less. It is amazing how far academia has sunk.
There is information and then there is “information.” In this case the information is probably false for at least one of the candidates. That is the only way they can get measurable results.
Well they obviously shouldn’t have misappropriated the state seal, duh.
Beyond that, Montana went 55-41 for Romney, but like every other state, the map looks like an ocean of red with islands of blue. So if the letters were mailed randomly, putting candidates on a Romney-Obama spectrum would be a huge favor to the most conservative candidate.
So unless the researchers painstakingly targeted their mailers to the blue islands, I don’t want to hear it about these so-called liberal universities.
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Overall, science is more and more coming to the conclusion that observing a system does indeed cause an impact.
But its an off the scale problem in political science (so much so that the very name…political science…is a misnomer. Very little science is actually involved). It is very difficult, if not impossible, to study voter behavior without actually impacting elections. Want to know how effective TV ads are? Or how effective they are vs. door to door canvassing? Good luck on finding a campaign willing to let you conduct that experiment at potentially their expense.
That is a big reason for why there are so many clueless political pundits everywhere. Conventional wisdom can’t really be tested…the best one can say is campaign manager X wins a lot of elections…or campaign manager Y loses a lot of elections. But as to the reasons why? Making it up…err, conventional wisdom, is as good of an answer as anything else.
And what is really amazing about this situation…is the sheer volume of money that is thrown at elections every two years, with absolutely no quantifiable measures of how the best way to spend it.
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What’s the big deal?
Except for the fact that responsible people will objectively examine their well-defined and disclosed exercise and adjust their methods to avoid confusion and misrepresentation in the future.
Meanwhile, this Sunday, Christian Coalition church partners will be handing out official looking documents filled with deliberate misrepresentations they’ll claim as the truth.
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You noticed that little bit of bitchiness, too, huh?
According to a description provided by Stanford, the research was intended “to compare voter participation levels in precincts that receive the additional information with voter participation in precincts that do not.”
I call bullshit. There are too many factors influencing voter participation levels in different precincts for this to have any prospect whatsoever of delivering any meaningful outcome. So if it was supposed to be a genuine experiment, they all deserve an instant fail for pisspoor methodology.
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Oh please - shove that shit. Nixon was not to the left of Obama.
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I doubt that. From my understanding, what they were trying to measure is voter participation. The measurable results would come about by targeting select precincts with the mailings and then compare the voter turn out with precincts that didn’t receive the mailing. Hopefully, they would see a noticeable difference between the two groups. (though personally, I think its a bit of a reach. But hey,that is why people test theories…to know instead of think). And of course, they still would have to adjust for other variables beyond their control (i.e., was it raining in parts of Montana and not others on election day? That sort of thing)
So given that hypothesis they were trying to prove,providing misleading information wouldn’t achieve anything. They weren’t testing to see voters ability to discern facts vs. fictions, for example, something that this test couldn’t possibly provide any meaningful results for.
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