* Rafael Laboissiere <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> [2005-04-22 12:07]:I did a statistical analysis (factor analysis) of the DPL 2005 election results and put the conclusions at: http://people.debian.org/~rafael/dpl-vote-2005-analysis/I added to the paper above some comments by Steve Greenland and Chris Lawrence. Here are the relevant paragraphs: Factor#2 - the Anthony Towns factor: In a personal communication, Steve Greenland suggested that AT's technical skills were irrelevant [...]
Uh, the point of analyses like these is to get an idea of trends without being overly influenced by what your preconceived notions are -- and claims of the form "foo was irrelevant" seem particularly inappropriate in a statistical context if they aren't directly supported. In any event, the conclusions should arise from the statistics, not be added on as a post-hoc explanation -- you could as well say "Some have suggested AT's platform was irrelevant, and the influence of AT's candidature was solely due to the alignment of Mars and Jupiter relative to the moon". Maybe that seems reasonable, maybe it doesn't -- but there's nothing in the statistics to differentiate that explanation from the ones presented.
Personally, while I would've expected more or less the reaction Steve suggests; that doesn't seem to what actually happened: by all the measures I could easily do, and while some people certainly voted strongly for or against me, I couldn't find any significant difference as to how folks voted for me compared to how they voted for Branden; except (obviously) that he got a few more votes in his favour.
(It might be interesting to see if the factors still apply when the ballots are normalised; with "1--" going to "1[2.5][2.5]" instead of "144")
Cheers, aj
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