[EL] Self-fulfilling Prophecy Dep't

[Justin Levitt]

The article that Rick links to, below, repeats yet another example of 
the "birthday problem" that Michael McDonald and I have written about 
<http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997888>.  The 
article below cites a case of alleged fraud from New Mexico, apparently 
"discovered" when the Secretary of State matched the names and dates of 
birth of people on the voter registration rolls to other state lists.

As Michael and I have shown, this may well be nothing more than basic 
statistics at work.  If you have a room of 23 people, there's about an 
even chance that at least two of them will share the same birthday -- 
month and day  (with 60 people, the chance is up around 99%).  If you 
have a room of 180 people, there's about an even chance that at least 
two of them will share the same date of birth -- month and day and year  
(with 460 people, the chance is up around 99%).   With common names in a 
large population, you fill up those "rooms" pretty quickly.   Put 
differently: in a population of over two million, you just need 180 John 
Smiths or Maria Rodriguezes to bet that two of them will share the same 
date of birth.

The New Mexico State Police are apparently now investigating 
<http://www.elpasotimes.com/news/ci_18260479>.  Before making noise 
about "destroying the integrity of the elections," I'd want to make 
pretty sure that those alleged problems weren't really just based on 
problematic math.

-- 
Justin Levitt
Associate Professor of Law
Loyola Law School | Los Angeles
919 Albany St.
Los Angeles, CA  90015
213-736-7417
justin.levitt at lls.edu
ssrn.com/author=698321


On 6/13/2011 9:28 PM, Rick Hasen wrote:
>
>
>     Self Fulfilling Prophecy Dep't? <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=19137>
>
> Posted on June 13, 2011 <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=19137> by Rick 
> Hasen <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>
> Will Election Fraud Destroy the Integrity of the 2012 Elections? 
> <http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/7847-will-election-fraud-destroy-the-integrity-of-the-2012-elections>
>
> Share 
> <http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D19137&title=Self%20Fulfilling%20Prophecy%20Dep%E2%80%99t%3F&description=>
> Posted in chicanery <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=12>, fraudulent 
> fraud squad <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=8> | Comments Off
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20110614/e364e7cd/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/png
Size: 1520 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20110614/e364e7cd/attachment.png>