You’ve probably heard about a study done by a sociology professor and some of his minions at Berkeley proporting to show anomolies in the e-voting numbers in Florida. Careful analysis of the study’s models by people with no axe to grind show that it’s a total load of crap:
“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.”
As we expected.
Link from Advice Goddess.