<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message 8ut1je$aef$[EMAIL PROTECTED]">news:8ut1je$aef$[EMAIL PROTECTED]...
> i tell you want I find disturbing:
> the "chad undercount error" that was discovered in the Volusia
> county complete hand count went 62% to Gore and 38% to Bush.
> However, as a whole, Volusia was only 53% Gore and 45% Bush.
> Since when do chads play favorites, or is this entirely realistic
> is one were to model chad failure as a Poisson process?
>
> mlewis
> ut southwestern medical center at dallas
Well, maybe they do, maybe they don't. I don't know that answer,
but I have a subtler point that may apply to statistical education
(hey, isn't it nice to get to an educational point rather than just
to political points??). As teachers of statistics, it's an interesting
issue to raise with students. We often presume independence
because we can't think of any reason *for* dependence
(or because we don't have the machinery to handle the
subtleties of dependence even if we knew that it was there).
But, why should we believe that the distribution of
partially detached chads is independent of voting patterns?
Perhaps blunt punch awls weren't distributed randomly. Perhaps
clean punches vary with the angle of the punch, perhaps the
angle of the punch varies with voter height, and perhaps height
is correlated with voting patterns. Perhaps the force needed
to make a clean hole varies with age, and perhaps age
is correlated with voting patterns. Each of these effects may
be quite subtle, but then the differences are pretty small,
too.
Alternatively, maybe there really *is* cheating going on. This
could be part of a discussion with students, too.
--Robert Chung
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