Notice the premise is that the ballot structure iscausing results that are
"unique". It isnt. Notice the people involved. (Center for Women in Politics)
Gee wonder how she feels about the election? This is absolute junk social
science. We will see the loyal teachers unions undoubtedly come up with a ton
of biased faulty "studies" before this thing runs its course. It discounts
entirely that there are anomolistic results in virtually every election.
Buchannan had 6000 votes in the same county in 1996. It also takes for
granted that the entiree matter wasnt created by political operatives. Just
like in Wisconsin. And the arrogant "Oh look what we found we better go
"public". Lets not check firts with other professional political observers
first or even look at another state or country. lets hurry over the the
Clinton News Network and get this out right away. Nice lefty logic. I wonder
if the "professor" fro the University of Wisconsin is on the trail of those
ballot fraud operators on campus?
Background
According to several news accounts, many voters in Palm Beach, Florida, have
claimed that they were confused by the ballot structure and may have
inadvertently voted for Buchanan when in fact they intended to vote for Gore.
The event prompted a discussion among several academic friends and
colleagues about whether the results could be statistically detected, since
Palm Beach county alone had the unusual ballot structure. One of the
participants in the discussion, Chris Fastnow, a political scientist and
director of the Center for Women in Politics in Pennsylvania at Chatham
College (and who is also my wife) found the Florida county-level returns for
the election on the internet at the CBS News website and passed them on to
me. We reasoned that if enough voters in Palm Beach county were confused and
mistakenly voted for Buchanan, it should be statistically detectable by
examining the vote for Buchanan relative to the votes for Gore and Bush for
all of the counties in Florida.
As a first cut, I (Adams) did three simple plots: one of Buchanan's votes vs.
Bush's votes, one of Buchanan's votes vs. Gore's votes, and one of Buchanan's
votes vs. the total votes cast in a county (see graphs below). For all of
the plots, all of the counties except one (Palm Beach) follow a pretty
regular pattern. The more votes Bush got in a county, the more votes
Buchanan got, and the number of votes that Buchanan got increases with Bush's
vote by a fairly predictable amount -- except for Palm Beach, which has many,
many more votes for Buchanan than would be reasonably expected, given all of
the other Florida counties. Similar results hold for the plots for
Buchanan's votes versus Gore's votes or versus the total votes cast. Again,
Palm Beach sticks out as an outlier from all of the other Florida counties.
The results seem to suggest that indeed something unique happened in Palm
Beach county. Just by visual inspection of the charts below, it appears that
instead of the 3407 votes Buchanan received in Palm Beach county, he probably
would have received under 1000 votes, if the other counties in Florida are
any guide.
Within seconds of my seeing the results, a colleague of mine wandered into my
office, saw the results himself, and urged me to make the results "public" as
soon as possible. I hastily drafted an email to my dept., pointing them to a
graph of Buchanan's vs. Bush's votes, which I had put up on my internet
server. The email spread across the university and onward, which prompted a
string of phone calls, emails, and so forth.
