FOIA Requesters Sue Government Agencies Over Non-Responses To Requests For Election-Related Documents

from the and-this-is-how-the-public-alters-the-FOIA-response-timetable dept

Two of the nation's foremost FOIA enthusiasts -- Jason Leopold and Ryan Shapiro -- are suing a variety of federal agencies for their failure to respond to requests for documents related to the 2016 election.

The first lawsuit, filed a couple of weeks ago, concerns records pertaining to FBI director James Comey's actions in the last few weeks before Election Day. Most of the documents sought relate to the FBI's on-again, off-again investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server. The pair also seeks a variety of communications between Comey and the rest of the FBI, as well as any internal FBI discussions about the number of leaks that accompanied Comey's last-minute dive back into the email investigation.

Shapiro and Leopold are also seeking unredacted copies of Clinton email investigation documents previously released by the FBI. They also would like to see what the FBI has on hand that references a variety of right-wing news sites, including Breitbart News and alternativeright.com.

The first lawsuit [PDF] alleges the FBI has violated FOIA law by not responding to their expedited request in a timely fashion. At the date of the lawsuit's filing, the FBI had yet to inform the requesters whether or not it would grant the request expedited status.

The second lawsuit [PDF], filed earlier this week, makes the same allegations. Expedited processing was requested, but the agencies targeted failed to rule on the processing request in a timely fashion. The list of defendants in this lawsuit is a bit longer. Shapiro and Leopold have requested election-related documents from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, CIA, DOJ, and DHS. None of these agencies have issued a ruling on expedited processing.

The documents sought here are also a bit different. The two requesters are asking for documents held by these agencies that pertain to the Russian interference -- hacking or otherwise -- in the electoral process. There are some interesting keywords listed, including Guccifer, Elite VPN, two IP addresses, and anything related to the alleged compromise of Clinton campaign head John Podesta's devices/email accounts.

Obviously, both of the requests being sued over are time-sensitive and of considerable public interest. The longer these agencies delay their responses, the less "interesting" the information is to the public. Pulling the trigger on lawsuits two weeks after FOIA requests are filed is the new way of playing ball with federal agencies. Left to their own timetables, the agencies would likely release these documents sometime between "the distant future" and "never." This prompts the parties listed to at least adhere to the letter of the law and make a determination on expedited processing. And, given the information sought, there's no way these will be the only FOIA lawsuits related to the requested documents.

Filed Under: cia, dhs, doj, election, fbi, foia, hillary clinton, investigation, james comey, jason leopold, lawsuit, odni, russia, ryan shapiro

Intelligence Committee Senators Call On Obama To Declassify Evidence Of Russian Election Interference

from the that-would-be-interesting dept

We've been a lot more skeptical than most about all the claims of "Russian interference" with the US Presidential election this year. While I don't doubt there was some effort to do something, Russia is such an easy scapegoat. Still, plenty of people insist that it's true, including those who at least should have a fair bit of insight into what actually happened. To me, the bigger issue is that attribution in many of these things is a lot more difficult than most people make it out to be.

Either way, it's quite noteworthy that seven Senators on the Senate Intelligence Committee have asked President Obama to declassify the evidence pointing to Russia and detailing what Russia actually did to attempt to interfere with the election. The Senators sent a very simple letter, which was released publicly, noting that a classified letter with a lot more details was also sent. Here's the entire text of the publicly released letter:

Dear Mr. President:

We believe there is additional information concerning the Russian Government and the U.S. election that should be declassified and released to the public. We are conveying specifics through classified channels.

Thank you for your attention to this important matter.

Of course, it needs to be noted that this will clearly be seen as a partisan effort. Of the seven Senators who signed on to the letter, six are Democrats, and the other, Senator Angus King, is an Independent who caucuses with the Democrats. Basically it's all of the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee except for Dianne Feinstein and Harry Reid. So, it's easy for some to spin this as a case of sour grapes about the Democrats not winning the election, and that they're now clinging to stories of Russian interference to explain what happened.

But... that spin holds somewhat less weight when you look at the details. First off, the letter itself was put together by Senator Ron Wyden. And, yes, his name comes up a lot around here, but that's because he has a pretty long history of being right on lots and lots of stuff. And that's been especially true when Wyden says that there's some secret info that the public deserves to know about. He's been right on that every single time he's said it. So the track record is there. When Wyden says the public deserves to know something, pay attention.

The second thing that provides more confidence here is that this isn't just random conspiracy theories about "rigged" voting or whatever that some have been spewing. This is a specific request for more transparency by asking for specific information to be released to the public -- specific information that the Senate Intelligence Committee members have seen.

Given that, it seems worth paying attention to -- and at least asking why the President won't declassify such information? If there really is such strong evidence, why not reveal it? So far, all of the evidence pointing to Russia has been fairly weak, and it feels a bit like groupthink that everyone just insists it's true. But it's entirely possible (and perhaps now, probable) that the intelligence community has some more serious evidence. And, if that's the case, it seems worth sharing with the public even if you were happy with the outcome of the election. If Russia really did "interfere" somehow in the election, the public deserves to know the details of it.

Filed Under: declassify, election, hacking, interference, ron wyden, russia

Somehow Everyone Comes Out Looking Terrible In The Effort For Election Recounts

from the you're-not-helping dept

I didn't quite think it was possible, but it seems that the fight over some potential election recounts has served to basically make everyone look petty and awful. American politics continues to be a dumpster fire. Here is the latest, in three acts.

Act One: Jill Stein to the rescue?

Last week, there was a bit of a fuss, starting with a mostly detail-free article from NY Mag suggesting that some well-respected voting researchers had found some abnormalities, and were suggesting that the Clinton campaign seek a full recount in three key states (Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan). After that started to get some buzz, the key e-voting researcher named in the article, Alex Halderman clarified that he didn't actually think there was any foul play, but that, since we all recognize there are security problems with e-voting machines, this could serve as a useful check. As we noted at the time, there was really no way for the Clinton campaign to take this on without much more realistic evidence of fraud, or else it would look incredibly petty and ridiculous -- especially given the concerns the Clinton campaign raised about Donald Trump potentially contesting the election results.

But, into the breach stepped Green Party candidate Jill Stein, who set up a crowdfunding page to see if people would donate to pay for the recounts in those three states (if a candidate requests a recount, they have to fund it). Stein claimed that she wasn't doing this to help Clinton, but as part of the Green Party's support for "election integrity." And, sure, yeah, we're all for election integrity, but Stein's crowdfunding campaign is a bit of a scam. She's preying on false hopes of Clinton supporters to raise a ton of money -- likely approximating twice as much as she raised during her actual campaign. And, for what? No one's entirely sure. Yes, some of the money will go towards demanding recounts, but those recounts might not happen. Instead, the Stein campaign can put in an official request for one, but that's no guarantee. And the Stein campaign just says that if it ends up with more money than it needs, it will "also go toward election integrity efforts and to promote voting system reform." But, without details, it's not at all clear what people are really donating to -- other than building a massive list for the Green Party of potential people to hit up for money in the future.

On Friday, Stein filed the first of these recount requests in Wisconsin, in which her campaign alleges "evidence of voting irregularities" even though there really isn't any. It's basically a made-up request that tosses in a dose or two of conspiracy theory about "foreign interference" in the election. Again, while I'm all for election integrity and am concerned about e-voting machines, alleging fraud without any real evidence is just conspiracy theory mongering.

Act Two: Hillary Clinton: well, okay, if we must...

After the money started flowing to Stein, the Clinton campaign, in the form of a Medium post from the campaign's top lawyer, Marc Elias, said that the campaign would somewhat reluctantly get involved in any recount effort. This is after admitting that the campaign found no evidence on its own of fraud and hadn't intended to ask for such a recount at all, despite a multi-pronged approach to review voting information to see if anything looked fishy. But, now, Elias claims that since Stein got the ball rolling, the Clinton campaign will get involved "just to be represented" in any effort:

Because we had not uncovered any actionable evidence of hacking or outside attempts to alter the voting technology, we had not planned to exercise this option ourselves, but now that a recount has been initiated in Wisconsin, we intend to participate in order to ensure the process proceeds in a manner that is fair to all sides. If Jill Stein follows through as she has promised and pursues recounts in Pennsylvania and Michigan, we will take the same approach in those states as well. We do so fully aware that the number of votes separating Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton in the closest of these states — Michigan — well exceeds the largest margin ever overcome in a recount. But regardless of the potential to change the outcome in any of the states, we feel it is important, on principle, to ensure our campaign is legally represented in any court proceedings and represented on the ground in order to monitor the recount process itself.

Which, okay, fair enough, but it still looks a bit silly overall, and a waste of money since they don't seem to think any recount effort will have any impact anyway.

Act Three: Donald Trump: meeeeeeeeee! this must be about meeeeeeeeee!

At this point, any reasonable President-elect in the same scenario would sit back, chuckle at the absurdity of the efforts discussed above and maybe focus on finishing up his planned cabinet appointments. But not Donald Trump. First, he mocked the Clinton campaign for joining in this effort. To some extent, you can understand this bit of gloating, after the lengths Clinton and her supporters went to in mocking Trump's own claims that he might contest the results of the election: Of course, this still looks kind of petty, especially given that Trump himself had made it quite clear that he would have actively contested the results had he lost. It's a bit silly to then mock the Democrats for doing what he would have done, even if they played this silly game of pretending to get involved reluctantly.

But, in true Trump fashion, he just can't leave things like this alone. The potential recount seemed to be getting too much attention, so he decided to roll out his bullshit "voter fraud against me" claims anyway, first arguing that he would have won the popular vote, if it weren't for 3 million illegal votes for Clinton. This seems partly in response to the fact that reporters are covering the fact that Clinton's lead in the popular vote keeps growing, and surpassed 2 million votes. Of course, who won the popular vote is effectively meaningless, but it seems to make Trump antsy. The whole "millions of people who voted illegally" thing is conspiracy theory bullshit, pushed by a former Texas official based on absolutely nothing -- but picked up by the crackpots at Infowars.

Let's be clear here: the claim is absolutely hogwash, yet is being repeated by our President-elect, who already won but seems insecure with the fact that he lost the popular vote. I thought that in this effort, both Jill Stein and Hillary Clinton would come out of this process looking like sketchy sore losers. What I didn't expect (though probably should have) is that Trump would come out of it looking even worse. Not only is he a sore winner, but he's reinforced the fact that he's willing to buy into complete crackpot conspiracy theories if they support his ego. That's insane, and incredibly dangerous.

He followed that up with yet another tweet, claiming that the media is ignoring "serious voter fraud" in Virginia, New Hampshire and California: This is also ridiculous. If there were any actual evidence of voter fraud, the press would be all over it -- even those that people want to insist supported Clinton. Even if the mainstream media were hopelessly in the tank for Clinton, getting a big story like evidence of widespread "serious voter fraud" would overwhelm that. But the fact is that there's no such evidence. Our President-elect is either making stuff up entirely, or repeating crackpot theories. Also, by falsely claiming that there's widespread voter fraud, Trump seems to be undermining his own message that there shouldn't be recounts going on. If he's really so concerned about widespread voter fraud (again, which didn't actually happen), why isn't he embracing the calls for recounts too?

If you want some actual facts: there's been almost no evidence of voter fraud, other than a few small attempts here or there. ProPublica has the best analysis of this, noting the many ways in which it has reviewed the data, looking for evidence of voter fraud and finding none at all. Here's a sampling of what ProPublica had to say: So, yeah. Everyone comes out of this looking absolutely terrible. Voting machines are terrible and prone to serious security problems, and should be done away with -- especially in their current form. But even with the security concerns, the idea that there was serious voter fraud due to those machines, or from other factors, is complete hogwash, and everyone should just stop it.

Filed Under: conspiracy theories, donald trump, e-voting, election, hillary clinton, jill stein, recount

After All That, E-Voting Experts Suggest Voting Machines May Have Been Hacked For Trump

from the just...-no dept

In this topsy-turvy world where nothing makes any sense at all any more, Donald Trump spent months and months spinning stories about how the election was "rigged" and e-voting machines were going to be hacked in favor of Hillary Clinton. While we've spent nearly two decades pointing out problems with e-voting machines, and urged governments to do away with them, it still seemed unlikely that a hack would be sustainable on a large scale -- in part because our election system is such a mess and is handled differently from state to state. And, as Ed Snowden himself pointed out, hiding such a hack would be quite difficult. But with Trump refusing to say if he would concede, and talking up how the vote would be rigged, combined with false stories that made the rounds incorrectly claiming that George Soros owned a company that was making millions of e-voting machines, it seemed like a recipe for disaster if Trump lost and his supporters started insisting that the voting machines were hacked.

But, of course, everything is upside down this year. Trump won... and now suddenly some Clinton supporters are arguing that e-voting machines may have been hacked. Now, to be clear, I wouldn't even bring up this story at all under most circumstances. Even as I don't trust e-voting machines, stories of actual hacked elections tend to be the kind of thing that conspiracy theory kooks pass around, rather than anything substantiated in any real way. What's giving some people pause this time around, is that one of the people claiming that the votes in some states may have been hacked is J. Alex Halderman.

Halderman is legit. He's basically the guy who studies how hackable e-voting machines are. We've been writing about Halderman since he was just a Princeton student, and hacking DRM systems. But he's been hacking e-voting machines for almost as long. And he's really, really good at it. Remember the story of the e-voting machine that was reprogrammed to play Pac-Man? That was Alex Halderman.

That said... this story still seems unlikely. The NY Mag story on it is woefully lacking in detail:

The academics presented findings showing that in Wisconsin, Clinton received 7 percent fewer votes in counties that relied on electronic-voting machines compared with counties that used optical scanners and paper ballots. Based on this statistical analysis, Clinton may have been denied as many as 30,000 votes; she lost Wisconsin by 27,000. While it’s important to note the group has not found proof of hacking or manipulation, they are arguing to the campaign that the suspicious pattern merits an independent review — especially in light of the fact that the Obama White House has accused the Russian government of hacking the Democratic National Committee.

But... it's not clear this holds up under much scrutiny. Perhaps Halderman and voting rights expert John Bonifaz have more details on what they found, but as Nate Silver noted, a more rigorous statistical look at the data -- controlling for education and race -- seems to make the statistical anomaly disappear. A big claim of actual vote rigging via e-voting machines would need a tremendous amount of evidence to be believable, no matter who won. So far, it doesn't seem like there's enough proof here, even if someone as respected as Halderman is involved in making these claims. But the fact that he is involved at least makes it worthy of further scrutiny.

But... either way, can we please finally get people to realize that e-voting machines without a verifiable paper trail are a disaster and should have no place in any election system? We'd all be better off if there wasn't even a question of hacked voter machines.

Filed Under: alex halderman, donald trump, e-voting, election, hillary clinton

Rutgers Lecturer Forcibly Sent For Psych Evaluation By NYPD For Some Tweets About The Election

from the reprogramming-in-effect dept

As you may have noticed, a lot of people have opinions on the election that just happened. And, many people are using social media to express those opinions, for good or for bad. Some people are excited, some people are angry. And no matter which side you fall on, you should recognize that expressing opinions on social media is protected (and should be encouraged as part of a healthy political process involving public discussion and debate). Kevin Allred, a lecturer at Rutgers University, is definitely on the side of folks who aren't happy with the results of the election. And, like many, he's been tweeting about his opinions on the matter. Having read through his Twitter feed, it doesn't seem all that out of the ordinary from stuff that I've seen from others. In fact, I'd argue that it actually seems fairly tame.

Either way, last night he Tweeted that the NYPD had come to his house because the police at Rutgers believed he was "a threat" based on some of his tweets. There were two tweets in particular. One was about burning a flag in protest and the other was a rhetorical question about the 2nd Amendment. To be clear: flag burning is perfectly legal and protected expression, as per the US Supreme Court. But here, Allred wasn't even burning a flag. He was talking about burning a flag, which is, obviously, also protected expression. Ditto on the random rhetorical on the 2nd Amendment. No matter what you think of Allred's position on the election, flag burning OR the 2nd Amendment, you should recognize that the 1st Amendment protects that expression. Update: It also appears that Allred deleted the original tweet on the second point which was certainly noticeably different than the way he describes it above. It wasn't just a question in the nature stated, but rather a more direct question of what would happen when he went out and started to shoot white people. That's still protected speech, but at least there's slightly more of an explanation for why law enforcement wanted to go visit him. But it's still not necessarily a reason to detain him.

The Rutgers police and NYPD apparently disagreed. They forced him to go to a psychiatric hospital to be evaluated. Allred blames Trump for this -- and while we've made it clear that we've got lots of concerns about Trump's views on free speech, Trump isn't exactly directing police to pick up people for various tweets. But the whole situation is extremely disturbing nonetheless. It's frightening how little law enforcement seems to recognize or care about the First Amendment.

Filed Under: 1st amendment, 2nd amendment, election, flag burning, free speech, kevin allred, nypd, rutgers
Companies: rutgers

CNN Uses Copyright To Block Viral Clip Of Van Jones' Impassioned Statement

from the can't-have-people-hear-that-without-paying-cnn dept

This election year may have been something of a clusterfuck for just about everyone... but it was damn good for CNN. The cable news channel that was generally filled with some of the most idiotic and meaningless banter made out like a bandit, apparently bringing in a billion dollars in profit by being the country's official organ player in a grand circus of political entertainment. The hiring of direct partisans on both sides, the failure to do very much actual deep looking at anything, and the complete pointlessness of whatever a Wolf Blitzer is all seemed to delight in turning anything about issues into horse race he said/she said soundbites.

And now it's being an annoying copyright asshole too.

As you may have heard, on election night, as the results rolled in, Clinton surrogate Van Jones made a very impassioned speech about the very real fear that he and many others felt about the results. It's worth watching. And CNN is really pissed off if you watch that without adding another stack of pennies to their billion dollar profits.

“CNN views this as a violation of our intellectual property rights,” said Andrew Morse, executive vice president of editorial for CNN, which is owned by Time Warner Inc.’s Turner. “We take that very seriously. The video was used without attribution or permission. We are currently exploring our options with regards to NowThis, Facebook and Twitter.”

To be fair, it looks like CNN's main focus is on a specific operation -- NowThis -- which was sharing the clip and was able to get more Facebook and Twitter shares of the video than CNN's own team. But, really, what does that say about CNN's social media operations -- that they let some other third-party get the jump on them and better promote their own videos? Is it infringement? It's possible, though I think there's a strong fair use argument there as well. But either way, that's not even the point. Here was a chance to actually share a rare "real" rather than plastic moment on CNN with lots and lots of people, and CNN was so focused on how it directly impacted their bottom line that they had to shut it down for anyone getting attention for it that wasn't CNN directly.

Filed Under: copyright, election, fair use, profits, van jones, video clip
Companies: cnn, nowthis

US Officials 'Strategically Leak' That US Is Ready To Hack Russia If It Interferes With Election

from the oh-come-on dept

For the past few months, we've been covering the increasingly eager stance of some in the "cybersecurity" and government worlds to proactively launch offensive cyberattacks on Russia. Going all the way back to the early summer, when Russia's role in any hacks was totally speculative, some were already advocating for "cyberwar" as a response. As we reached the fall, suddenly it was leaked that many inside the government were getting itchy trigger fingers to launch some sort of digital attack. And, government officials really seemed to rely on the ever gullible reporters at NBC to push this story.

So it comes as little surprise that NBC has the rather clumsily, if strategically linked news that the US government is all ready to cause cyber havoc on Russia if it does anything serious to interfere with US elections. Think, for just a second, how people in the government and national security worlds would react if someone like Ed Snowden leaked the following bit of info:

U.S. military hackers have penetrated Russia's electric grid, telecommunications networks and the Kremlin's command systems, making them vulnerable to attack by secret American cyber weapons should the U.S. deem it necessary, according to a senior intelligence official and top-secret documents reviewed by NBC News.

But, of course, since it's the US government leaking this info, no one seems to care. Of course, that's because everyone knows what's going on here. This is US officials basically telling Russia: "Hey, don't mess with our election or we'll do some cyber stuff." The claim that the US has hacked into Russian systems is certainly believable. That's what the NSA does after all (y'know, when it's not collecting info on Americans).

But the whole story is just silly posturing in a weird election year filled with silly posturing about hacks and cyberwar. Who knows what's going to happen tomorrow, but it would be nice if it didn't involve any nation state feeling the need to break out "cyber weapons" for any reason.

Filed Under: cyberwar, election, hack, hack back, leaks, nsa, russia
Companies: nbc

Judge Refuses To Block NY No-Selfie Ballot Law Because It Would 'Create Havoc To Not Enforce It'

from the wut? dept

Our long national nightmare that has been this election cycle is nearly over. Election day is approaching and early voting has begun, which means you've probably already seen your social media connections happily and proudly posting about their votes. This is a good thing for democracy, in my opinion, as celebrations of participation can only encourage others to participate as well. Yet not everyone is on board with this social media pride. We had already discussed New Hampshire's law against so-called ballot selfies, in which people post their completed voting ballots to social media. That law was struck down as unconstitutional, because of its restriction on the most important form of speech, political speech.

But, as you may know, New Hampshire isn't the only state to pass such a law -- in fact lots of states have them, including New York. As in other states, New York's is being challenged in federal court at present. Three voters sued in October to get enforcement of the law blocked. The judge in the case, however, has refused to issue such an order, claiming that to do so would sow confusion on election day.

U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel in Manhattan said it would "wreak havoc on election-day logistics" to issue a preliminary injunction against the law, which prohibits the display of "ballot selfies." "The public's interest in orderly elections outweighs the plaintiffs' interest in taking and posting ballot selfies," though they remained free to express their political message through "other powerful means," Castel wrote.

It's an odd bit of reasoning. What Castel is saying is that ordering non-enforcement of this law -- doing nothing, in other words -- would create more havoc than actually tasking law enforcement with enforcing it. How is that remotely possible? Doing nothing cannot possibly create more problems than doing something. Doing nothing is doing nothing, after all. What havoc could come from local law enforcement sitting idly by as people proudly share that they voted on social media?

When one takes into account that this is a matter of free political speech, so too does Castel's suggestion that the public benefit outweigh's those of the plaintiff's seem odd. The public is the one that would benefit from not enforcing a law that has had a similar version of it already declared unconstitutional in another state. Other states have had the courts all over the map on this question, with California also seeing a refusal to stop enforcement of its ballot selfie law, while states like Indiana and New Hampshire have had those laws struck down.

It seems this may be headed for the Supreme Court, where we'll hopefully have a full roster of justices ready to make a ruling on selfies at the ballot box.

Filed Under: ballot selfies, election, first amendment, free speech, new york

How One Young Black Man Supporting Trump Massively Skews The LA Times Presidential Poll

from the poll-position dept

Let's jump right into this, because this post is going to be a bit on the wonky side. It's presidential silly season, as we have said before, and this iteration of it is particularly bad, like a dumpster fire that suddenly has a thousand gallons of gasoline dropped onto it from a crop-duster flown by a blind zombie. Which, of course, makes it quite fascinating to watch for those of us with an independent persuasion. Chiefly interesting for myself is watching how the polls shift and change with each landmark on this sad, sad journey. It makes poll aggregating groups, such as the excellent Project FiveThirtyEight, quite useful in getting a ten-thousand foot view as to how the public is reacting to the news of the day.

But sites like that obviously rely on individual polls in order to generate their aggregate outlooks, which makes understanding, at least at a high level, just how these political polls get their results interesting as well. And, if you watch these things like I do, you have probably been curious about one particular poll, the U.S.C. Dornsife/Los Angeles Times Daybreak poll, commonly shortened to the USC/LAT poll, which has consistently put out results on the Presidential race that differ significantly from other major polls. That difference has generally amounted to wider support for Donald Trump in the race, with specific differences in support for Trump among certain demographics. To the credit of those that run the poll, they have been exceptionally transparent about how they generate their numbers, which led the New York Times to dig in and try to figure out the reason for the skewed results. It seems an answer was found and it's gloriously absurd.

There is a 19-year-old black man in Illinois who has no idea of the role he is playing in this election. He is sure he is going to vote for Donald Trump. Despite falling behind by double digits in some national surveys, Mr. Trump has generally led in the USC/LAT poll. He held the lead for a full month until Wednesday, when Hillary Clinton took the nominal lead. Our Trump-supporting friend in Illinois is a surprisingly big part of the reason. In some polls, he's weighted as much as 30 times more than the average respondent, and as much as 300 times more than the least-weighted respondent.

Alone, he has been enough to put Mr. Trump in double digits of support among black voters. He can improve Mr. Trump's margin by 1 point in the national survey, even though he is one of around 3,000 panelists.

So, how does one person manage to skew a major national political poll in favor of one candidate to the tune of entire percentage points? Well, it turns out that a confluence of factors that include who is included on the poll and how often, how the poll respondents are weighted, and how this one particular voter fits into the demographic weighting converged to pretty much mess everything up. Let's start with the weighting.

The USC/LAT poll does things a bit differently than the other national polls. All polls rate respondents by demographics to correct for voting tendencies. The math can get gory and the NYT post does a good job of going through it, but you can think of it like this, for a very imprecise example: a poll respondent from the 18-35 demographic will be weighted less than a respondent from the 36-55 demographic, because the latter demo is more likely to actually show up and vote than the former. There is indeed some subjectivity in this, but the large demographic weighting drives the error margin down for the most part. But the USC/LAT poll deviates from the large-demo weighting and instead weights at very small demographic levels.

The USC/LAT poll weights for many tiny categories: like 18-21 year old men, which the USC/LAT poll estimates make up around 3.3 percent of the adult citizen population. Weighting simply for 18-21 year olds would be pretty bold for a political survey; 18-21 year old men is really unusual...When you start considering the competing demands across multiple categories, it can quickly become necessary to give an astonishing amount of extra weight to particularly underrepresented voters -- like 18-21 year old black men.

Which is how our single friend in Illinois became the poll's most weighted voter, being a 19 year old black man. The heavy weighting on tiny demographic categories caught him several times and, since he is voting for Trump, despite his demographic generally not voting for Trump, his heavily-weighted response skews things wildly. But that isn't all.

The USC/LAT poll does something else that's really unusual: it weights the sample according to how people said they voted in the 2012 election. The big problem is that people don't report their past vote very accurately. They tend to over-report three things: voting, voting for the winner and voting for some other candidate. They underreport voting for the loser. By emphasizing past vote, they might significantly underweight those who claim to have voted for Mr. Obama and give much more weight to people who say they didn't vote.

Which, again, catches our friend from Illinois. At nineteen, he obviously didn't vote in the last election. So his response is weighted even more. Using the poll's own data, the New York Times re-ran the poll using the same broad categories most other major polls used. When done, Hillary Clinton led in every single one of the iterations except for the one immediately proceeding the GOP convention. The difference between the poll's results as reported and what they would be with the normal weighted categories and the omission of the past vote weighting ranged form 1-4 points. In a political poll, that's enormous.

The final factor here is that the USC/LAT poll is a panel poll, which means that the same respondents are used each time the poll is run. So, our young black trump-voting man from Illinois got to skew these results nearly each and every time. The one time he failed to respond to the poll, Hillary Clinton suddenly led within it. As the NYT notes:

The USC/LAT poll had terrible luck: the single most overweighted person in the survey was unrepresentative of his demographic group. The people running the poll basically got stuck at the extreme of the added variance.

And, of course, the poll aggregators might include this poll, skewing the aggregate numbers as well. This isn't to say that all polls are skewed in the same manner. They aren't. The reason this is a story is because this poll is the outlier. But it is kind of fun to see how badly the sausage can be made if the methodology isn't in tune.

Filed Under: donald trump, election, hillary clinton, la times, politics, polls, usc/lat, weighting
Companies: la times, usc