[EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

[Larry Levine]

You are dealing with the wrong vendors. I too have run across those who seek
to impress with all the whiz-bang ornaments they find available. I stay away
from those. My vendor never alters a name. Maybe add a phone number from a
commercial list. Maybe an ethnic surname code with a caveat for caution, and
some voting history. But leave the name and address alone. 
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 8:51 AM
To: law-election at uci.edu
Subject: Re: [EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

We really don't know exactly what the commercial list vendors do since their
techniques are proprietary. My impression from working with commercial
vendors' data and talking with employees is that they clean the voter
registration data by supplementing it with data from other sources. When
they clean the data, they might add information like a phone number, and
they might correct what they consider to be errors in the name field
identified by matching -- through a fuzzy matching algorithm -- data in
another database. They also improve the data through contacts made by the
campaigns that are feed back into the system. This may be the weakest link
since the data source is often volunteers, who might not be trustworthy. I
wouldn't call it fraud, since the vendors believe that they have enhanced
the product that they are selling. I'd call it limitations with the data and
algorithms that can in some cases fix errors in the voter registration files
and in others introduce new error  s.

============
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

-----Original Message-----
From: Larry Levine [mailto:larrylevine at earthlink.net]
Sent: Tuesday, April 23, 2013 11:35 AM
To: Michael P McDonald; 'Rick Hasen'; law-election at uci.edu
Subject: RE: [EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

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 s  tarting 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."

Posted in Uncategorized | 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

_______________________________________________
Law-election mailing list
Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election



_______________________________________________
Law-election mailing list
Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election