Monday, January 14, 2008

Strong geographical clustering of Diebold precincts

Someone from Reddit has just forwarded me a map showing that precincts using Diebold machines are geographically aggregated in the south-east of the state. Finally, this could be the explanation!

We still need to do a study of geographically and demographically similar pairs with distinct voting methods.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Definitely interesting, but I'd be willing to bet the cause of this geographical clustering is population (I know very little about New Hampshire but is the south-east where the major cities are?) and thus money, interests, and likelihood for buying newfangled voting machines. This isn't to say it's a bad idea to try to control for this, but true spatial analysis is hideously complicated and something I'm not at all qualified to help with. I will tell you that library(maps) in R has some pretty county-level maps of every state in the country, so if you do get this together you could use that to give it nice shiny production values at least (which matters quite a bit actually if you want mainstream media to pick it up).

Good luck!