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Wired News
Florida E-Vote Study Debunked
By Kim Zetter?
Story location: http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,65896,00.html
02:00 AM Dec. 07, 2004 PT
A study by Berkeley grad students and a professor showing anomalies with
electronic-voting machines in Florida has been debunked by numerous
academics who say the students used a faulty equation to reach their
results and should never have released the study before getting it
peer-reviewed.
The study, released three weeks ago by seven graduate students from the
University of California, Berkeley's Quantitative Methods Research Team and
sociology professor Michael Hout, presented analysis showing a discrepancy
in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used touch-screen
voting machines versus counties that used other types of voting equipment.
But Bruce McCullough, a decisions science professor at Drexel University
in Philadelphia, and Binghamton University economics professor Florenz
Plassmann released an analysis (.pdf) of the Berkeley report criticizing
the results.
According to the Berkeley study, the number of votes granted to Bush in
touch-screen counties far exceeded expectation, given a number of variables
-- including the number of votes those counties gave Bush in 2000 -- while
counties using other types of voting equipment gave Bush a predictable
number of votes.
The analysis was not peer-reviewed, although Hout and the students said
that seven professors examined their numbers. They would not speculate
about what occurred with the voting machines, but voting activists on
internet forums seized the study as proof of faulty voting machines or
election fraud. Drexel University's McCullough, however, found fault with
the study.
"What they did with their model is wrong, and their results are flawed,"
McCullough said. "They claim those results have some meaning, but I don't
know how they can do that."
McCullough said they focused on one statistical model to conduct their
analysis while ignoring other statistical models that would have produced
opposite 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)," McCullough said.
Charles Stewart, an MIT political science professor, called the study "the
type of exercise that you do in a graduate data-analysis class" rather than
as an academic paper.
"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," Stewart said. "I know
of no theory or no prior set of intuitions that would have led me to run
the analysis they ran."
He pointed out that only two of the 15 counties using touch-screen
machines in Florida exhibited anomalous results.
"There was something unusual that went on in two counties, but there are
many other things that could give rise to this anomaly," Stewart said.
"Most of them are things that we're pretty sure affected this presidential
election -- such as get-out-the-vote efforts by Republicans and special
efforts at mobilizing Jewish voters over the issue of Israel and terrorism."
Hout defended his study, saying that he and the students tested several
alternative hypotheses, but none eliminated the machines as a possible
cause.
"The point that there might be something else that these counties have in
common besides the technology is always a possibility in any statistical
analysis," he said. He acknowledged that he and the students were unable to
look at other data that might alter their conclusion, such as a breakdown
of votes for Bush per voting machine or an analysis of votes cast by
absentee paper ballots in the touch-screen counties.
Regardless of the merits of the Berkeley study, Stewart said valid
questions about the election results in Florida and elsewhere remain
unanswered. To that end, a number of groups will be investigating and
releasing reports in coming months.
On Tuesday, Common Cause, the Century Foundation and the Leadership
Council on Civil Rights are holding a day-long conference in Washington,
D.C., to discuss the election. And the nonpartisan Social Science Research
Council has launched a National Research Commission on Elections and Voting
to examine systemic issues with elections and voting as well as specific
issues from this year's elections, such as the disparity between exit polls
and final election results. The Government Accountability Office is also
looking into issues related to the election.
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R. A. Hettinga