Princeton Election Consortium

I am moving my post-election comments on Florida here. This is partly to maintain order and partly because I am starting to wonder whether there is a story here. After chewing over the Berkeley group’s analysis and corresponding with some of you, I have thought of reasons why there is no real county-level anomaly. The […]

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Some notes on future improvements to the calculation. David Kline points out that to calculate the single-state probabilities, for small (<30) numbers of polls, a t-distribution is more appropriate than a normal distribution. This distribution has longer tails and will give less certainty in the estimates. Going in the converse direction, in retrospect some states […]

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Regarding the ongoing Florida voting fraud controversy, S. Doershuk, who has expertise in demography, makes a constructive suggestion: “It might be instructive to examine some similar counties in Georgia and Alabama, particularly those which border on north FL, to see if the same pattern can be found. Given the ‘bright red’ nature of both border […]

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This is really interesting: a rundown of exit poll breakdowns by gender, education, issue, and so on. It seems to refute ideas that have been going around about the importance of religion and rural voters. The upshot seems to be that the biggest positive for Bush was terrorism (as opposed to Iraq, which was a […]

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Here is a pre-election article by Kerry consultant Mark Mellman that predicted Bush’s popular vote share to within 0.1%. Going by the article, the factors that went into the calculation included job approval, the economy, war, and right track/wrong track sentiment. Putting aside the talk about values (based on a single poorly-worded exit poll question), […]

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I continue to be deluged by email on the subject of the anomalies in Florida voting in small counties. As I said below, these data sort fairly well by the rural/urban divide. In a graph by Jeff Chambers that there may be some small remaining anomaly. However, this could be ballot spoilage. Here’s an analysis […]

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Commentary on the electoral divide by the American Prospect’s Harold Meyerson.

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A number of you have mailed in a plausible explanation for the seemingly anomalous results in optical-scan voting counties in Florida. Essentially, the apparent disproportionate voting for Bush occurred in less populated counties. These counties, being non-urban and having fewer resources, are still using optical-scan ballots. Therefore three variables are correlated here: smaller populations, voting […]

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Jim G sends in his first look at county-level analysis of Florida and suggests that nothing is amiss. However, a full listing of results by voting method raises questions not about electronic voting, but about optical scan voting. I am open to any explanation for these numbers – resolution soon, I hope.

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