election-law_gl-digest    Monday, February 18 2002    Volume 01 : Number 143




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Date: Mon, 18 Feb 2002 10:32:41 -0800
From: Rick Hasen <rick.hasen@lls.edu>
Subject: still more for Florida election junkies

Here is the abstract and link to a paper posted on the Political
Methodlogy Archive by Kosuke Imai and Gary King,. It is called "Did
Illegally Counted Overseas Absentee Ballots Decide the 2000 U.S.
Presidential Election?"

Abstract

Although not widely known until much later, Al Gore received 202
more votes than George W. Bush on election day in Florida.  George
W. Bush is president because he overcame his election day deficit
with overseas absentee ballots that arrived and were counted after
election day.  In the final official tally, Bush received 537 more
votes than Gore.  These numbers are taken from the official results
released by the Florida Secretary of State's office and so do not
reflect overvotes, undervotes, unsuccessful litigation, butterfly
ballot problems, recounts that might have been allowed but were not,
or any other hypothetical divergence between voter preferences and
counted votes.  After the election, the New York Times conducted a
six month long investigation and found that 680 of the overseas
absentee ballots were illegally counted, and no partisan, pundit,
or academic has publicly disagreed with their assessment.
In this paper, we describe the statistical procedures we developed
and implemented for the Times to ascertain whether disqualifying
these 680 ballots would have changed the outcome of the election.
The methods involve adding formal Bayesian model averaging procedures
to King's (1997) ecological inference model.  Formal Bayesian model
averaging has not been used in political science but is especially
useful when substantive conclusions depend heavily on apparently
minor but indefensible model choices, when model generalization is
not feasible, and when potential critics are more partisan than
academic.  We show how we derived the results for the Times so that
other scholars can use these methods to make ecological inferences
for other purposes.  We also present a variety of new empirical
results that delineate the precise conditions under which Al Gore
would have been elected president, and offer new evidence of the
striking effectiveness of the Republican effort to convince local
election officials to count invalid ballots in Bush counties and not
count them in Gore counties.

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Direct Link To PDF File:

http://web.polmeth.ufl.edu/papers/02/imai02.pdf

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   The Political Methodology Archive at the University of Florida is
   accessible at: http://web.polmeth.ufl.edu.   Comments or questions
   should be forwarded to Jeff Gill (jgill@polisci.ufl.edu).
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End of election-law_gl-digest V1 #143
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