Trafford Publishing: Spot the Spin: The Fun Way To Keep Democracy Alive and Elections Honest

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Spot the Spin: The Fun Way To Keep Democracy Alive and Elections Honest

by Alan F. Kay

130 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-0375; ISBN 1-4120-2547-8; US$13.95, C$16.04, EUR10.88, £7.21

It's fun! You'll learn how to: spot the spin in polls and in media, make good election choices, and you might help save democracy, now hanging by a thread.

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About the Book About the Author Excerpt Catalogue Information

About the Book

Political officials, in power or out of power, promise what pleases the people. Their advisors add more spin. The media still more. In office they turn away from the people and quietly pay off financial backers big time. When mainstream media catch up with this, call it lying or corruption, they give it a quiet burial. Few learn what occurred until long after the fact.
The media can pronounce a candidate "unelectable". Not wanting to throw away their vote, many turn away. But, wait a minute! Regardless what the media says, if enough voters decide to go for a candidate, then he or she is the one elected. Now if the people knew that many others besides themselves were leaning to the candidate, they could bypass the media and get the candidate they like elected. But if good polling is not quick, available and understandable to the public, then the candidate elected is the media's candidate, not the people's choice.
Once you know a little about how the system works, and how to tell a good poll from a bad poll, spotting the spin in polls, in political punditry and in media can be fun.

About the Author

Alan F. Kay is experienced at uncovering the true will of the people through surveys done by the Americans Talk Issues(ATI) Foundation which he founded. Dr. Kay invested $2 million on 32 of these nonpartisan surveys beginning in 1987.
ATI was created as the first independently funded, public interest polling organization, to determine what Americans really believed about the most significant issues facing their country in the late twentieth century.
The ATI public interest polling project - and the wider adoption of this methodology to facilitate the process of representative democracy- remains one of his primary interests.

Experiences which influenced Dr. Kay's interest in public interest polling:
As a Japanese language interpreter in the Army of Occupation in Tokyo in 1946 saw what was happening. Allies Soviet Union and China became adversaries, Southeast Asia (Vietnam), previously of little interest, became an area which had to be saved from communism, and our former enemies rapidly were transformed into client/supplicants and later into allies.
Made early contributions to Chaos Theory. (Dr. Kay received a PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 1952.)
Co-founded a military research and development firm (1954-1963). Here, he invented the "scalar feed" for microwave antennas, the heart of most microwave communications systems in use today, as well as designed and built the first feed for the 1000-foot radio telescope in Arecibo, Puerto Rico. His experience working for the military taught him that at least 30% of the military budget went into waste, inefficiency and acquisition of weapons for purely political reasons.
Developed the first realtime, multi-terminal networked computer system for financial institutions from 1966-1979. Significantly, Dr. Kay's company, AutEx, was offering interactive, networked stock trading services to brokerage houses and financial institutions, including the first commercially available e-mail, two months before a consortium of five universities started using the military system which ultimately became the Internet.
Beginning in 1978, an investor and board member in start-up companies pioneering energy efficiency, pollution clean-up technologies, and e-commerce.

Dr. Kay's long-term experience with the ATI project also makes him a formidable critic of the poorly designed or implemented "polls" so dear to the hearts of professional politicians and their spinmeisters. As an insider in the arcane world of "push polls," "focus groups," and "wedge issues," he can tell us how to spot a bad poll, what is needed to make a good poll, and why we should respect a good one. With todays telecommunications capability, he believes the American people should be voting frequently on issues and less frequently on political candidates.

Excerpt

Spot the Spin -The Fun Way to Keep Democracy Alive During the 11/02/04-1/20/05 Crisis
Chapter 1 Elites Vs. the People - The 2004 Election
The Struggle
There is a developing struggle between the elites with the wealth and power to dictate the course of government for their own benefit and the rest of us who are getting a small and falling share of benefits, many of which in fact prove to benefit elites more than the people.
The purpose of the book is to present an interesting and previously little-known way to get more freedom for all in order to better control our individual destinies and to re-assert enough political control to make this country work well for everybody, not just for the well-heeled elites. The way to go starts with spotting both the spin elites put on everything made public and what good, careful, high-quality polling can reveal about the public's interest.
At stake are nothing less than improving our job opportunities, our environmental, health care, and educational systems, our approaches to national defense and security, and a government that truly serves the people.
Who are the elites?
At the top are a few hundred people:
A handful of powerful politicians and elected officials in Washington and in state governments.
Multi-millionaire investors and heads of very large corporations.
The moguls of the mainstream media, approximately the six largest media conglomerates.

A second level are many of the top lawyers, experts, accountants, pundits, campaign advisors, technicians, engineers, and many others who benefit mightily from catering to the wealth and power of the top elites.
The people are the rest of us * ninety-nine plus percent of the population of the US. To understand that I am on the right side see "About the Author".
It's a World-Wide Problem
The disconnects between elites and the people, is a worldwide phenomenon. Most heads-of-state claim that majorities of their people approve of their policies and actions. Even dictators seek to legitimate their power based on similar claims. Opponents also claim that the people are with them. Who is right, leaders in power or opposition? Often, it turns out, neither. Large majorities of the general population worldwide have views different from leaders both in and out of power. This leads to enormous disconnects between the leaders and the led that are not alleviated as regime follows regime * even in democracies.
For example, polls conducted by GlobeScan, a UK company (formerly Environics, Toronto), in twenty countries around the world over the last five years have shown repeatedly that people everywhere want better education, health care and environmental protection. Yet governments spend more on the military and large projects of dubious value to ordinary people but financially valuable to elites and special interests.
The Role of Public Interest Polling
There is only one practical way to find out what people want for governance: careful, high quality, scientific, random sample polling. Today in 60 countries there are pollsters who are capable of conducting such polls with remarkable accuracy. Why are their findings not better known?
One reason is that many polls are never made public - for example, those that leaders frequently commission to find out what to say to solidify their support. Secondly, a properly conducted, careful poll is labor-intensive and with 500 to 1500 interviews, too expensive for most purposes. Thirdly, polling is a competitive industry and commercial pollsters in all countries reflect the biases of their sponsors just to stay in business.
Furthermore, the mainstream news media, press, TV and radio, reflect the biases of their owners, advertisers, and political leaders in countries where they distribute or broadcast. This upstages findings from even the highest quality, most authoritative non-commercial polls that show the disconnect between leaders and public. This is especially true in the West, particularly the USA with its commercial "sound byte" news coverage.
The situation is not entirely hopeless. Sometimes commercial pollsters do high quality polls in the public interest. A few non-profit pollsters do so too - unfortunately with generally limited access to mass media. Public-interest polling often comes up with remarkably different results than those of the commercial firms such as Roper, Harris, Yankelovich, and, best known around the world, Gallup.
Political Fund Raising
One US development that has become increasingly clear to all in the last decade or two is that candidates for national and large state offices must raise prodigious amounts of money for their election and re-election campaigns from wealthy financial backers who openly expect to be rewarded by legislation and regulations favorable to themselves in amounts much larger than what they shell out for election campaigns.
If, as it appears, a quarter of a billion dollars is now the cost of winning a presidential election, all financial backers as a group will easily get returns from the new president's administration in the range of 2 to 20 billion dollars worth of benefits: reduced taxes; low cost loans; juicy government contracts; approvals of lucrative mergers and acquisitions; and even perks like overnights in the Lincoln bedroom. Most sponsors of lobbying and large campaign contributors look at their contributions as investments that can pay-off 10 to1, 100 to 1, and even more.
The Crisis of the 2004 Election
The rewards to those who wink at, or quietly pay for, corruption of the election process to assure that their guy or their party wins is so large that it is only realistic to expect much more massive fraud in future elections than we have ever seen before. This is especially true for 2004, when large numbers of votes can be voided, miscounted, uncounted, disappeared, or transformed by software quietly embedded in touch-screen voting machines, many in the 2004 election with no written record of the ballot cast that is essential if a recount is required. If no recount can be justified, then the existence of the paper trail is of no use, except to prove, long after the election is over, that justice miscarried, as happened in Florida 2000.
Florida 2000 might look like a small-scale dress rehearsal in hindsight. In 2004 there will be dozens of different types of voting machines that will have to be programmed or set up just before election with data: candidate names, offices, instructions, etc., almost unique to each of the 200,000 precinct voting places, because the voting for local offices too takes place on election-day. About two weeks is all the time available for programming or setting up the two million voting machines necessary for a nationwide vote in one day. To find and prevent the small amount of fraud in a few key states that is needed to swing a close election is more difficult than finding a needle in a giant haystack covering the entire country. The oversight to do this all on election-day does not exist. National, election-day voting and vote-counting is a unique activity unlike any other computerized or partially computerized process that the US has ever dealt with.
There are ways to overcome all of this in time. See for example http://www.alanfkay.com/National%20Elections.htm. But all of the problems mentioned above cannot be solved by Nov 2004. 2004 is the hump we have to get over to re-secure democracy.
Political Spinning Leads to Lying and the End of Democracy
Spin is melded into politicians' appearances, speeches, and remarks; more spin is added by advisors and handlers; and further spin comes from the mainstream media. The revenue of TV, radio, newspapers, and magazines comes largely from advertising that is designed to maximize product sales and focus attention on the positive aspects of the product, the brand, or the company that is paying the freight. Fair, balancing views of the product/service are excluded from commercials and print ads. The results are unfair and unbalanced ads that ubiquitously lie by omission. Enough spinning by candidates, advisors, and media finally becomes nothing less than lying. Lying by omission works surprisingly well for politicians with the cooperation of the mainstream media. By the time the country catches up with a lie shrouded in secrecy, officials have gotten the benefits they seek from running the government, and so far, seem to pay little or no price for degrading the voice of the people, and corrupting the democratic process. If the electorate does not know the pertinent facts, the people cannot make wise decisions on election-day.
It is no exaggeration to say that democracy hangs by a thread.
Resolving the Crisis
Learning to spot the spin in political polling, will allow you to understand what high quality public-interest polling can do to make you and ultimately all people understand the consensus of the public's view of issues. The elites would prefer that the public not know the public's true views. When in power they keep secret anything that shows the weakness of their policies and the poverty of their choices. Spotting the spin is the first step in reclaiming true democracy.
If you are ready to learn how easily you can spot the spin in political polls, read on.

Catalogue Information