[EL] Invisible voters versus imaginary fraud

[Lorraine Minnite]

Nate makes a lot of good points here, however, I'd like to ask a 
different question that lurks beneath the surface of some of the 
conflicting recent court decisions in these cases, and that is, what to 
do with judges who misunderstand the social science evidence in front of 
them.  This was the case in Pennsylvania, and also in one of the earlier 
Georgia voter ID court opinions.  In both, conclusions from survey data 
were rejected on clearly mistaken grounds regarding the science of 
survey sampling and misunderstandings about reliability and statistical 
inference.  My recollection from the Georgia case was that expert 
testimony from a literacy expert was found not credible because the best 
national survey data we have on the literacy rates of Americans was 
based on a representative  sample that did not include any respondents 
from Georgia.  In the Pennsylvania case, the judge's opinion about Matt 
Barreto's expert testimony and survey findings was rejected as "biased" 
and based on the judge's misunderstanding of statistical inference.  I 
haven't read the recent Texas decision carefully enough yet to know 
whether this problem is evident in that opinion as well.

I am aware of Armand Derfner's work and the work of other scholars on 
the difficulties associated with treating social science data as 
evidence in voting rights and other civil rights cases.  I'm curious 
about what weight we should attach to court opinions in which judges 
make these kinds of mistakes.

Lori Minnite

>
>     "Voter ID cases: Invisible voter versus imaginary fraud"
>     <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39460>
>
> Posted on August 31, 2012 8:28 am 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?p=39460> by Rick Hasen 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?author=3>
>
> Must-read Nate Persily column 
> <http://www.cnn.com/2012/08/31/opinion/persily-voter-id-laws/index.html> 
> for CNN.
>
> Share 
> <http://www.addtoany.com/share_save#url=http%3A%2F%2Felectionlawblog.org%2F%3Fp%3D39460&title=%E2%80%9CVoter%20ID%20cases%3A%20Invisible%20voter%20versus%20imaginary%20fraud%E2%80%9D&description=>
> Posted in election administration 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=18>, The Voting Wars 
> <http://electionlawblog.org/?cat=60> | Comments Off
> -- 
> Rick Hasen
> Chancellor's Professor of Law and Political Science
> UC Irvine School of Law
> 401 E. Peltason Dr., Suite 1000
> Irvine, CA 92697-8000
> 949.824.3072 - office
> 949.824.0495 - fax
> rhasen at law.uci.edu
> http://law.uci.edu/faculty/page1_r_hasen.html
> http://electionlawblog.org
> Now available: The Voting Wars:http://amzn.to/y22ZTv
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Law-election mailing list
> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
> http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20120831/9e5767d6/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: image/png
Size: 1504 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://webshare.law.ucla.edu/Listservs/law-election/attachments/20120831/9e5767d6/attachment.png>