| Topic: |
Science > Prophecies-Of-Nostradamus |
| User: |
"Aidan" |
| Date: |
19 Nov 2004 06:00:55 PM |
| Object: |
Researchers at University of Berkley find abnormalites in Florida election statistics |
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/index.html
Working Paper: The Effect of Electronic Voting Machines on Change in
Support for Bush in the 2004 Florida Elections
Michael Hout, Laura Mangels, Jennifer Carlson, Rachel Best
With the assistance of the
UC Berkeley Quantitative Methods Research Team
Motivation
Public discussion of changing voting technology raised concern that
some forms of electronic voting might produce a discrepancy between
voters' intentions and tabulations of the election's outcome. In
particular, touch-screen voting machines were criticized for being
unverifiable unless they printed out a hard copy that voters could
certify as correct and election officials could keep in case a recount
was ordered. Without a paper trail, statistical comparisons of
jurisdictions that used e-voting are the only tool available to
diagnose problems with the new technology.
In our research we used ordinary least squares and more
sophisticated linear modeling approaches to assess the statistical
properties of e-voting. In particular we develop models that predict
both the percentage of the votes registered for the incumbent -
President Bush - and the amount that percentage changed between 2000
and 2004. These models can incorporate adjustments for a large number
of factors that we or others thought might help explain the patterns.
These include socioeconomic and demographic factors like the typical
family's income or its ethnic ancestry. We also adjust for ecological
factors like the size of the county. Most importantly we adjust for its
voting history, reaching back not only to the 2000 election but farther
to the 1996 election. To this list of factors we add consideration of
whether the county's voting technology was e-touch machines or optical
scanning equipment.
Finally we translated percentage differences into vote totals in
two ways. The first was to assume that the vote margin was due to the
appearance of "ghost votes" - votes registered for in a way that helped
one candidate but did not reduce the total for the other. Mechanisms
that would produce this outcome include having votes electronically
registered in the machine prior to any voters using the machine or
after the last voter used it - through software errors or hacking - and
other flaws that interfere with counting after some limit is reached -
reports indicate that some machines may have been programmed to stop
counting or subtract votes after some limit is reached. The second
count assumes a misattribution by the machine, i.e., a vote intended
for candidate A that gets counted for candidate B. Since every vote
miscast for candidate B costs candidate A one too, the difference is
doubled, so we double our initial estimate to get our estimate of the
miscount under this type of error. A combination of one type of error
and the other would yield a vote total in between.
Finding
Electronic voting raised President Bush's advantage from the tiny edge
he held in 2000 to a clearer margin of victory in 2004. The impact of
e-voting was not uniform, however. Its impact was proportional to the
Democratic support in the county, i.e., it was especially large in
Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade. The evidence for this is the
statistical significance of terms in our model that gauge the average
impact of e-voting across Florida's 67 counties and statistical
interaction effects that gauge its larger-than-average effect in
counties where Vice President Gore did the best in 2000 and slightly
negative effect in the counties where Mr. Bush did the best in 2000.
The state-wide impact of these disparities due to electronic voting
amount to 130,000 votes if we assume a "ghost vote" mechanism and twice
that - 260,000 votes - if we assume that a vote misattributed to one
candidate should have been counted for the other.
(follow link to read more:
http://ucdata.berkeley.edu/new_web/VOTE2004/election04_WP.pdf)
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