Please circulate widely. >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. . . http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/ Tom Walker Sandwichman and Deconsultant Bowen Island, BC
