Evidence vs. Faith: Election 2004 (Score 3, Insightful)

One of the most disturbing aspects of the 2004 US Election was the degree to which voters (and the media often) ignored "truth" and "evidence" in favor of faith and authority in making their decisions (see, for example, PIPA's report on the "knowledge" of Bush and Kerry supporters. It is sad and more than a little disappointing to see the same mistakes being made on SlashDot's own forums.

The simple fact is that many of the comments already made were clearly made by those who haven't bothered to read the actual report or even it's summary of findings (well linked). The simplest summary is that given a wide variety of independent variables (i.e. data that might have some causal relationship with the outcome) and one independent variable (namely the shift in support from Dem to GOP in the presidential race between 2000 and 2004), the only significant movement occurred in predominantly Democratic counties with electronic touch-screen voting machines. The statistical tests reject virtually any possibility that these shifts were related to number of voters, income, Hispanic population, or voter turnout.

The question, of course. is what does this mean? Well, in isolation, not much. It is likely that some other factors not included in the independent variables were very significant. Unfortunately, when these results are combined with the discrepancies between the early exit polls and the vote counts. And contrary to a lot of analysis, past history has these exit polls much more accurate than they seem to have been this year.

Was there fraud then? We don't know. Evidence suggests that there may have been something going on (and the spread from 130K-260K has to do with uncertainty as to what kind of error might have taken place since misassigned votes are worth twice the difference of phantom votes). And the reality is that the rush to unauditable e-voting has made it more difficult to determine what kind of errors may have taken place.