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November 26, 2004
Did Bush Really Benefit from E-voting in Florida?
By Alan Abramowitz
Perhaps you've seen or heard of an analysis by Michael Hout, a Berkeley sociologist, of the impact of e-voting in Florida. Hout and his associates claim that Bush did better than expected in the 15 Florida counties using e-voting. See the link below to their report.
I did my own analysis of their data. It does not support their conclusions. In fact, I find that Bush did slightly worse than expected in the 15 e-voting counties.
I did three things. First, I just compared the change in percent for Bush in Florida counties with and without e-voting. Contrary to their conclusion, Bush gained more support in counties without e-voting. Then I looked at a scatterplot of Bush2004% by Bush2000%. There is no indication at all here of any non-linearity in the relationship. Therefore, I cannot see why the Hout team added a quadratic term to the model. Then I did a regression analysis of Bush2004% with Bush2000% and a dummy variable for e-voting counties. The dummy variable had a negative but statistically insignificant effect. So if anything, Bush did slightly worse in 2004 in counties with e-voting when you control for his support in 2000. My guess is that this is because the e-voting counties tend to be in large metropolitan areas but Bush's gains were greater in smaller, rural and exurban counties.
Posted by Ruy Teixeira at 06:43 PM | link
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