[EL] Marathon bombing suspects not registered to vote

[Derek Muller]

Buzzfeed (the first place I saw this original news) reports it was from
Nexis:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/chrisgeidner/what-we-know-about-boston-marathon-bomb-suspect-dzhokhar-tsa

In fact, it was just as easy for me to find, too (try it yourself!). I
logged onto LexisNexis, went to the "Public Records" database, to the
"Voter Registration" database, entered "Tamerlan Tsarnaev," and I got the
same result in literally minutes with essentially no effort.

Of course, it has this disclaimer, too, which the Buzzfeed screen capture
omitted: "*Important:* The Public Records and commercially available data
sources used on reports have errors. Data is sometimes entered poorly,
processed incorrectly and is generally not free from defect. This system
should not be relied upon as definitively accurate. Before relying on any
data this system supplies, it should be independently verified. For
Secretary of State documents, the following data is for information
purposes only and is not an official record. Certified copies may be
obtained from that individual state's Department of State."

As effective a disclaimer as to be expected, I suppose.

Best,

Derek

Derek T. Muller
Associate Professor of Law
Pepperdine University School of Law
24255 Pacific Coast Hwy.
Malibu, CA 90263
+1 310-506-7058
SSRN Author Page: http://ssrn.com/author=464341


On Tue, Apr 23, 2013 at 8:24 AM, Michael P McDonald <mmcdon at gmu.edu> wrote:

> 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."
>
> 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
>
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