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Vitter's Cat (not his alleged Cathouse)
Published on November 1, 2007 12:15 AM
Category: Disclosure, Enforcement, Faulty Assumptions
According to the quandary known as Schroedinger’s Cat, the cat is neither alive nor dead until it is observed, and when observed is thought to be half-alive and half-dead simultaneously. The quandary has confounded quantum physicists since Schroedinger proffered it in 1935, and has confounded laypersons that more often than not confuse the quandary with another phenomenon known as “observer effect.” The phenomenon of “observer effect refers to changes that the act of observing will make on the phenomenon being observed. For example, for us to ‘see’ an electron, a photon must first interact with it, and this interaction will change the path of that electron.” Whether this is really the case in quantum mechanics, political scientists agree that telling poll recipients who is conducting a poll will ruin the poll’s results. It is in a recent FEC enforcement action, then, that we can observe the FEC in quandaries of its own: confusion over the importance of observer effect and of the dividing line between public polling and political advertising. Call the quandary “Vitter’s Cat.”
In the Matter of David Vitter for U.S. Senate, MUR 5587R, the FEC held that a campaign committee’s poll of undecided voters must carry a disclaimer. This was not a push poll, nor did the Commission find that it was fraudulent in any way. According to the FEC’s General Counsel, the poll “simply asked the recipient, ‘In the U.S. Senate Race (sic) in November, are you more likely to vote for,’ and then listed the names of candidates including David Vitter. The caller was instructed to rotate the order of … the candidates' names when making the calls.” Nonetheless, the FEC held the Vitter campaign liable for not placing a disclaimer at the end of its polling survey.
We can’t comment on this any better than did dissenting Commissioner Hans von Spakovsky, who said:
From a public policy standpoint, the majority’s view that research and polling calls require disclaimers is something that will make social scientists and pollsters shudder with dismay. Legitimate political survey research never identifies the campaign paying for the survey, because doing so undermines the validity of the results. Many survey respondents, especially those who are less well-informed, look for cues to the “correct” answer to a question. … Telling someone who is responding to a political survey the name of the sponsor of that survey undermines the fundamental tenets of political survey research.
So it would appear that a candidate who wants solid numbers on his name i.d. or continued viability must wait for New York Times/CBS, Wall Street Journal/NBC, LA Times/Bloomberg, USA Today/Gallup, or AP/Ipsos to find interest enough to fund a poll in his race. Indeed, this is the place in a post where we at CCP would launch into a diatribe on the unintended consequences of congressional meddling with the intent of the Framers. But, frankly, this MUR presents the type of distinction that expert election commissioners can be expected to understand and errors agency experts are expected to avoid. As noted by Commissioner von Spakovsky, nothing mandates a rote and apparently erroneous application of the disclosure statute here. And it is Commissioner von Spakovsky (and we at CCP) who holds out hope that “a research or polling call could be found exempt from the disclaimer requirements ... in the future, and that this MUR is not a broadly definitive statement on any and all research and polling calls.”
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