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November 19, 2004
If you heard about the Berkeley paper
Alleging 130,000 extra votes in Florida, here’s an analysis.
Even taking at face value the findings that the paper makes, those findings don’t support the conclusion that electronic voting caused the increase in votes for Bush.
The Berkeley working paper warrants more careful analysis. I’m sure that more able empiricists than I will, in short order, scrutinize their findings and conclusions. But as I’ve repeatedly warned, we should be wary of making accusations that the election was “stolen” before all the facts are in and have been analyzed carefully. In the end, such hasty judgments will do great harm to the vital objective of making our election system more fair and equal.
It’s also a “working paper”, which means it hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet. My personal opinion? They’ve worked really hard to find the result they wanted by cherry picking their data. It doesn’t mean Bush got extra votes because e-voting machines were used. There could be a number of reasons why that happened, the most obvious being that Gore was not Kerry, so perhaps some voters switched. All that statistical analysis works about as well as polls do, since its based on the same technique.
Posted by the at November 19, 2004 8:21 AM
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