[EL] McDonald study, birthdate distribution in real voter list

[Michael McDonald]

A couple of useful cites...

First, here is a link to the article, wherein we tackle the issue of
non-uniform birth dates. I'm surprised no one on the Election Law list serve
has mentioned the most obvious, that the voting (and registered) population
tends to be older so the years are not uniformly distributed.

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=997888

Second, here is the Wikipedia entry for the Birthday Problem. Although we
are interested in the Birth Date Problem for the Double Voting application,
the principles why the non-matched dates are removed are discussed here.
This is a very common statistics puzzle posed to students, and we cite in
our article many published articles by statisticians who have explored
variants to the Birthday Problem, some of which people are raising. Really,
this is a very well-understood puzzle that may be difficult to wrap your
head around the first time you are presented it, which is why it is often
presented in introductory statistics classes. And, perhaps, why it lends
itself to double voting allegations.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor, George Mason University
Non-Resident Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution

                             Mailing address:
(o) 703-993-4191             George Mason University
(f) 703-993-1399             Dept. of Public and International Affairs
mmcdon at gmu.edu               4400 University Drive - 3F4
http://elections.gmu.edu     Fairfax, VA 22030-4444


-----Original Message-----
From: Bev Harris [mailto:bev at blackboxvoting.org] 
Sent: Sunday, September 11, 2011 6:16 PM
To: Paul Lehto
Cc: mmcdon at gmu.edu; law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] McDonald study, birthdate distribution in real voter list

Actually, you wouldn't remove the non-matching birth date, just as you don't
remove the possibility of landing on heads from the probability of coin toss
#3
just because coin #2 landed on heads.

> My question on the quoted portion from Michael McDonald's email above
> goes to why would one "have to remove that [non-matching] birth date
> from the [remainder of the] matching search?"


Bev Harris
Founder - Black Box Voting
http://www.blackboxvoting.org

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