Wednesday - December 08, 2004

Florida E-Vote Study Debunked

From The Association For Computing Machinery (ACM) we get this little tidbit about some tricky shenanigans going on at UC Berkeley. It proves the old axiom that if you really try hard enough you can skew statistics to suit any argument you want to make. I agree 100% with Professor McCullogh. As a Computer Science professor myself, I would have handed the research results back to the students. I would also have applied my boot to their arrogant little rear ends. Asshat little pricks, indeed!

As for Professor Hout’s assertion that the research was “reviewed by seven professors”, I have a suspicion those professors were all in the English Literature and Medieval Arts departments. Hout needs his ass kicked too. As a sociology professor he more than likely wouldn’t know the difference between an outlier and an inner tube.

Numerous academics are refuting a published UC Berkeley study’s conclusion that President Bush received an abnormal number of votes in Florida counties that used touch-screen voting machines in the recent election with their contention that the researchers’ equation was flawed. Voting activists cite the study as evidence of election fraud or defective voting equipment, but Drexel University decisions science professor Bruce McCullogh says the Berkeley researchers analyzed the vote outcomes using one statistical model while discounting other models that would have produced dramatically different results. “They either overlooked or did not bother to find a much better-fitting [statistical] regression model that showed that e-voting didn’t account [for the voting anomalies],” he explains. Another point the dissenting academics raise is the lack of a thorough peer review of the analysis, although Berkeley sociology professor Michael Hout and his student team insisted that their findings were reviewed by seven professors. “If I were to get this article as [an academic] reviewer, I would turn it around and say they were fishing to find a result,” remarks MIT political science professor Charles Stewart, noting that only two out of 15 Florida counties employing e-voting systems had anomalous results. Hout vouches for the report while admitting that his team was not able to study other data that might have led to a different conclusion, such as analysis of votes cast by absentee paper ballots in the counties with touch-screen machines. The disputation of the study will probably not stop planned investigations into election issues by the Social Science Research Council, the Government Accountability Office, and others.

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Posted by The Skipper     on 12/08/2004 at 02:53 PM   
Filed Under: • Miscellaneous •  
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