Florida E-Vote Study Debunked

A study by Berkeley grad students and a professor showing anomalies with electronic-voting machines in Florida has been debunked by numerous academics who say the students used a faulty equation to reach their results and should never have released the study before getting it peer-reviewed.

The study, released three weeks ago by seven graduate students from the University of California, Berkeley's Quantitative Methods Research Team and sociology professor Michael Hout, presented analysis showing a discrepancy in the number of votes Bush received in counties that used touch-screen voting machines versus counties that used other types of voting equipment.

But Bruce McCullough, a decisions science professor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and Binghamton University economics professor Florenz Plassmann released an analysis (.pdf) of the Berkeley report criticizing the results.

According to the Berkeley study, the number of votes granted to Bush in touch-screen counties far exceeded expectation, given a number of variables -- including the number of votes those counties gave Bush in 2000 -- while counties using other types of voting equipment gave Bush a predictable number of votes.

The analysis was not peer-reviewed, although Hout and the students said that seven professors examined their numbers. They would not speculate about what occurred with the voting machines, but voting activists on internet forums seized the study as proof of faulty voting machines or election fraud. Drexel University's McCullough, however, found fault with the study.

"What they did with their model is wrong, and their results are flawed," McCullough said. "They claim those results have some meaning, but I don't know how they can do that."

McCullough said they focused on one statistical model to conduct their analysis while ignoring other statistical models that would have produced opposite results.

"They either overlooked or did not bother to find a much better-fitting (statistical) regression model that showed that e-voting didn't account (for the voting anomalies)," McCullough said.

Charles Stewart, an MIT political science professor, called the study "the type of exercise that you do in a graduate data-analysis class" rather than as an academic paper.

"If I were to get this article as (an academic) reviewer, I would turn it around and say they were fishing to find a result," Stewart said. "I know of no theory or no prior set of intuitions that would have led me to run the analysis they ran."

He pointed out that only two of the 15 counties using touch-screen machines in Florida exhibited anomalous results.

"There was something unusual that went on in two counties, but there are many other things that could give rise to this anomaly," Stewart said. "Most of them are things that we're pretty sure affected this presidential election -- such as get-out-the-vote efforts by Republicans and special efforts at mobilizing Jewish voters over the issue of Israel and terrorism."

Hout defended his study, saying that he and the students tested several alternative hypotheses, but none eliminated the machines as a possible cause.

"The point that there might be something else that these counties have in common besides the technology is always a possibility in any statistical analysis," he said. He acknowledged that he and the students were unable to look at other data that might alter their conclusion, such as a breakdown of votes for Bush per voting machine or an analysis of votes cast by absentee paper ballots in the touch-screen counties.

Regardless of the merits of the Berkeley study, Stewart said valid questions about the election results in Florida and elsewhere remain unanswered. To that end, a number of groups will be investigating and releasing reports in coming months.

On Tuesday, Common Cause, the Century Foundation and the Leadership Council on Civil Rights are holding a day-long conference in Washington, D.C., to discuss the election. And the nonpartisan Social Science Research Council has launched a National Research Commission on Elections and Voting to examine systemic issues with elections and voting as well as specific issues from this year's elections, such as the disparity between exit polls and final election results. The Government Accountability Office is also looking into issues related to the election.

To read all of Wired News' coverage of e-voting, visit our Machine Politics section.