[EL] data errors

[Richard Winger]

What Lorraine says about Philadelphia was generally true for U.S. election returns in the era before computers.  Official state election returns frequently had addition errors in them, especially back when every state printed each candidate for presidential elector on the ballot, and voters were free to vote for individual candidates for presidential elector.  This made a lot of work for election officials when they calculated the election returns.  That was especially true in states with a large number of presidential electors.
If there were 8 slates of presidential electors on the ballot in a state like New York, that was over 300 individual candidates for presidential elector, all with their own vote totals.
 Richard Winger
415-922-9779
PO Box 470296, San Francisco Ca 94147
      From: Lorraine Minnite <lminnite at gmail.com>
 To: Election Law <law-election at department-lists.uci.edu> 
 Sent: Tuesday, October 28, 2014 11:06 AM
 Subject: [EL] data errors
   
The subject is on my mind because I've worked with a lot of voter files over the last 30 years (back in the day of the mainframe…uggh), including, a few years ago, files processed by Catalyst, and my practical experience is that reported election data is quite prone to inaccuracies - not necessarily always of a magnitude that puts results in question, but lots of errors, nonetheless.
I give you one example: I'm in the middle of converting 50 years of official annual voter registration and turnout reports for the City of Philadelphia from paper to electronic format. I'm through about half of the reports and on almost every page there are calculation errors appearing in summary columns.  The one I'm looking at here is an exactly 10,000 vote error (+) for the Republican candidate for Mayor in the historic 1983 Municipal election in which Philadelphians elected their first black mayor. I've gone over the numbers several times and the reported vote total is simply wrong - either that, or the ward totals are incorrect to the tune of exactly 10,000 votes.  Philadelphia's 66 wards averaged between 10,000 and 11,000 votes each, so this would be like adding an entire ward of voters voting only for the Republican.  Bad, but in this case not enough to hand victory to the wrong winner (Wilson Good's margin was still more than 130,000 votes).  I've had similar experiences working with New York City voting data and reports.
I think this bears on the list discussion of the Richman et al. non-citizen voting study because that study rests a conclusion that is so out of bounds with everything else we know about the level of illegal voting in the U.S. on a finding of five people in an opt-in Internet survey with vote validation conducted by a data company using less than transparent methods.  If election officials sometimes can't add up 66 numbers correctly, isn't it possible that people who didn't vote get recorded as voting, or that matching algorithms are wrong, or that people make other kinds of mistakes that could produce five errant records in a dataset of 30,000 or more?  The authors are not able to personally verify that these five people are indeed non-citizens and that they actually cast ballots in 2008, so it would stand to reason that misreporting, record-keeping and/or methodological errors are likely better explanations for the anomalies.  Instead, the researchers here started from an assumption that there is wide-scale non-citizen voting in the U.S. and that the problem is measuring it.  What is the evidentiary basis for this assumption in the first place?  If the CCES included 200 or 300 people in this category I might worry, but I would still want to verify the records myself before jumping to a conclusion that is so out of whack with all of the research on illegal voting scholars, including myself, have done so far.  When you dig into the real world beyond what statistical analysis (based on potentially faulty data) presents, you often find all kinds of problems.
Lori Minnite
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