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Tuesday, November 09, 2004

Caltech VTP releases "report"

The Caltech/MIT Voting Technology Project has released a "report" on the discrepancy between exit polls and the official vote count. The report concludes that suspicions of foul play are groundless based on the data. The report itself is, however, very lean on actual data and reads like a blog itself. It presents figures on the distribution of voting technology used in several states, which is good information. But its analysis is fundamentally flawed in several ways:
  • It assumes that the early exit poll results are essentially useless, and should be pretty much ignored. This may or may not be true. The report does not give any evidence either way, so poll accuracy remains open to speculation.
  • Second, they argue that if e-voting fraud is the cause, then we would expect to see more discrepancy in states with the highest prevalence of e-voting. This argument assumes that e-voting fraud is a random phenomenon with uniform distribution across states and precincts. If I were going to comit fraud, I would probably be smart enough to do it strategically, targeting only those states and precincts which would be most profitable for my candidate.
  • Third, they assume that security breaches, if they occur, should be uniform across states and precincts. This sort of begs the question. If there is a security breach in one state, then we might expect to see a large anomalie in the vote tallies for that state. The probability of security breech is only loosely dependent on the prevalence of e-voting machines, because there are potentially several ways to breech security, including unauthorized access to central systems.
  • Fourth, they don't actually state their assumptions clearly. They just sort of make them in a sloppy, bloggesque manner. The report is really an obnoxious read, in that it makes little substantive argument, but instead adopts a dismissive stance toward the blogosphere.

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