[EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

[Larry Levine]

As long as the vendor uses the official voter registration file as a base
and simply adds information about voters on that file there should be no
problem and no one who isn't registered should be added to the list. If a
vendor is selling voter data from a list that adds non-voters that would be
fraud, as list rentals usually are based on a cost per thousand names.
Larry

-----Original Message-----
From: law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu
[mailto:law-election-bounces at department-lists.uci.edu] On Behalf Of Michael
P McDonald
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 8:24 AM
To: Rick Hasen; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

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 reco  rds, 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.

============
Dr. Michael P. McDonald
Associate Professor
George Mason University
4400 University Drive - 3F4
Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

phone:   703-993-4191 (office)
e-mail:  mmcdon at gmu.edu               
web:     http://elections.gmu.edu
twitter: @ElectProject
"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
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

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