[EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

[Michael P McDonald]

Does anyone know which commercial databases indicated incorrectly that the Tsarnaev brothers were registered to vote? 

Many on the list are using commercial databases in their scholarly work. I was unaware that reporters have been using these commercial databases, too. I've been critical of using these black box data since the vendors use opaque proprietary algorithms to manipulate and clean the data. While I've been more worried about vendors purging records, this case may indicate an instance where the commercial matching algorithms created a false positive match by identifying persons on the registration list with data in another database that contained records for the Tsarnaev brothers. Anyone using these commercial databases uncritically in their work -- scholarly, reporting, or otherwise -- would be wise to learn more about the limitations of these data. And I'm not just talking about the commercial data: the canonical voter registration files -- or more generally, election management databases -- also have errors in them, as do any large-scale databases. When there are millions of records, errors creep into the system. This is something that anyone who has worked with these data for a long time already know, but many who are just starting to work with so-called "Big Data" are just beginning to learn.

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Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor
George Mason University
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Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

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"Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote" 
Posted on April 22, 2013 8:48 am by Rick Hasen 
Josh Gerstein: "Though there have been reports that Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev were registered to vote and there are entries in commercial databases indicating they were, they were not according to the documents available at the Cambridge Elections Commission."

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Rick Hasen
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UC Irvine School of Law
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