Sunday, January 20, 2008

A Good Paper on the NH Vote

My Dartmouth colleague Michael Herron pointed me to his paper on the recent NH primary and how voting patterns seemed to depend upon whether the vote was counted by hand or by machine. They use some neat but complex statistical methods, and arrive at this conclusion (quoting from their executive summary:

"With respect to Hillary Clinton's surprise victory in the Democratic Primary and the differences across vote tabulation technologies in Clinton's and others' votes, our results are consistent with these differences being due entirely to the fact that New Hampshire wards that use Accuvote optical scan machines have voters with different political preferences than wards that use hand counted paper ballots."

These statistical results may be important, given that it appears some people may not accept the recount results (conspiracy theories run real deep!).

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

But how do you account for all the students in the large cities that turned out to vote for Obama and used voting machines instead of paper ballots?