Late in the afternoon on February 8, 2006, Matt Damschroder, Director
of the Board of Elections in Franklin County, Ohio, responded via
email to several questions I had asked Franklin County officials about
data they had sent me pertaining to their voting machine allocation
decisions for the 2004 general electon (to be precise, he responded to
a message sent by my research assistant). We had asked the Franklin
County Board of Elections to supply the count of voters in each
precinct that they used to make the machine allocations. In response
they had sent us several files on January 23, 2006. We then asked,
among other questions, which of several alternative formulas matched
the measure used to make the allocation decisions. Damschroder's
message was in response to those questions.
In light of Damschroder's detailed responses, I now believe that the
data provided by Franklin County do not allow us to recover the
information or the decision rules Franklin County officials used to
allocate voting machines to precincts for the 2004 general election.
I have accordingly updated my paper posted at
http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/franklin2.pdf
The description I included in my previous message on this subject
(sent at 8 Feb 2006 02:22:11), regarding the relationship between the
racial composition of precincts and the number of voters per machine,
is not meaningful. Damschroder's responses make it clear that the
variables I used to try to measure the number of active voters in June
cannot be used to do that. See the paper for more details.
Walter Mebane
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Walter R. Mebane, Jr. email:
wrm1@cornell.edu
Professor office voice: 607/255-3868
Department of Government cell: 607/592-0546
Cornell University fax: 607/255-4530
217 White Hall WWW:
http://macht.arts.cornell.edu/wrm1/
Ithaca, NY 14853-7901
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