Warren Sarle wrote:
> I would prefer to blame the NY Times article on the ignorance of the
> reporter rather than on the abdication of professional responsibility
> by the statisticians involved, but clearly some big-name statisticians
> need to respond to this article.
>
> To suggest that there is no way to get a more accurate result than to
> recount multiple times and pick a number somewhere in the middle is
> profoundly ignorant of standard statistical methodology for checking
> data quality. Every practicing statistician routinely applies multiple
> checks for data quality. Many such checks could be used to detect
> voting irregularities. Some obvious examples of checks that should
> trigger investigations would include a precinct in which voter turnout
> was far higher or lower than average, or a candidate receiving far
> more votes in a precinct than there are voters registered to his or
> her party. Both of these checks would have detected actual mistakes
> in the Florida vote count (see the second article below).
>
> Obviously, US law does not allow a statistical adjustment of voting
> counts, but just as obviously, the statistical analyses of the Florida
> votes posted on edstat-l by Robert Dawson and at
> http://elections.fas.harvard.edu/election.html by Jonathan N. Wand,
> Kenneth W. Shotts, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, Walter R. Mebane, Jr., and
> Michael C. Herron show that the will of the voters in Palm Beach
> County was indeed thwarted. One can quibble about the details of the
> analysis, but the results for Palm Beach County are so
> extreme--especially when analyzed at the precinct level--that there
> can hardly be any doubt that Buchanan received between 2000 and 3000
> votes intended for Gore.
>
> This is a wonderful opportunity to promote the value of sound
> statistical analysis, to get some rare good publicity for the
> statistical profession, and to improve the democratic process in the
> USA.
>
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alan Zaslavsky) writes:
> > The following might be interest for those following press coverage of the
> > possible role of statistics in this dispute. (The printed version in the
> > edition I receive contained additional comments by David Freedman, also
> > downplaying the potential of statistics in this highly charged situation.
> > I would not follow Persi very far on the analogy to census undercount
> > adjustment, since anything that would be done now on the elections would
> > be post hoc and supported by little research ... that's another argument!)
> > --------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
There is another message, probably more important, to obtain. These methods for
voting are simply prone to error. Punching holes in cards has been abandoned in
every segment of data acquisition save voting. It is too easy to make several
forms of errors. As such, we must really ask: Is it time to eliminate punch card
voting methods? I believe that the answer is patently obvious.
What then should they be replaced by? The system should be cheap, flexible and
verifiable. I believe that the best system is optical scanner methods. Optical
scanners are stable. They are fast. They are based on real things - pieces of
scanner paper. The ballots can be quickly examined to see that they do not have
double counts.
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