Re: Late Absentee Ballot Acceptance Rates in Florida

[EugeneGall]

  (J. Williams) wrote:
Snip
Since the envelopes containing the absentee ballots were separated
from the ballots themselves, no information about the voter was
available:  The Times asked Gary King, a Harvard expert on voting
patterns and statistical models, what would have happened had the
flawed ballots been discarded. He concluded that there was no way to
declare a winner with mathematical certainty under those
circumstances. His best estimate, he said, was that Mr. Bush's margin
would have been reduced to 245 votes. Dr. King estimated that there
was only a slight chance that discarding the questionable ballots
would have made Mr. Gore the winner. 

I thought that Gary King's conclusion to be the most interesting part of the
lengthy Times analysis.  However, I will freely admit that I don't understand
King's A Solution to the ecological inference problem.  I bought his book,
read it twice, am convinced with King that the ecological inference problem is
important and that previous methods are inadequate, but his description of the
algorithm left me utterly confused.  The synopsis of King's statistical
analysis for the Times doesn't help much:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/politics/15METH.html?searchpv=nyt
I'd like to include King's method in my stats class.  I think there are many
instances of the ecological inference problem in ecology, but I have to
understand his book  solution first.

Today In his analysis for The Times, Dr. King first examined the actual vote
and the count of flawed ballots, and he computed the maximum and minimum
numbers of absentee votes that Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush could possibly have
received in each county. He then used the methodology described in his book, A
Solution to the Ecological Inference Problem, to estimate the unknown voting
behavior of the 680 voters whose votes were found to be flawed, and subtracted
them from the vote totals.

The analysis took into account actual overseas absentee vote totals for each
county that were certified on Nov. 26 by Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
Dr. King also weighed other factors, like the race and party of overseas voters
and their military status, and other election results in each county. The
analysis then averaged these 62 separate but similar models, weighting each
according to its statistical importance, to produce a single best estimate of
the results.


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Late Absentee Ballot Acceptance Rates in Florida

[J. Williams]

In an exhaustive investigation, the N.Y. Times has studied the
acceptance pattern of absentee ballots which arrived in Florida
following the November election. 
 
In an analysis of the 2,490 ballots from Americans living abroad that
were counted as legal votes after  The Times found 680 questionable
votes. Although it is not known for whom the flawed ballots were cast,
4 out of 5 were accepted in counties carried by Mr. Bush, The Times
found.  

The counties carried by Mr. Gore accepted 20% that had no evidence
they were mailed on or before Election Day. Counties carried by Mr.
Bush accepted 60% of the same kinds of ballots. Bush counties were 4
times as likely as Gore counties to count ballots lacking witness
signatures and addresses.  

Since the envelopes containing the absentee ballots were separated
from the ballots themselves, no information about the voter was
available:  The Times asked Gary King, a Harvard expert on voting
patterns and statistical models, what would have happened had the
flawed ballots been discarded. He concluded that there was no way to
declare a winner with mathematical certainty under those
circumstances. His best estimate, he said, was that Mr. Bush's margin
would have been reduced to 245 votes. Dr. King estimated that there
was only a slight chance that discarding the questionable ballots
would have made Mr. Gore the winner. 

It just gets curiouser and curiouser.   

If interested, the complete article is online:
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/15/national/15BALL.html








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