JoshuaZ comments on Open Thread June 2010, Part 4 - Less Wrong
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Strange occurrence in US South Carolina Democratic primary.
The Washington Post profiled Alvin Greene last week
10 minute video interview with Greene
What happened here?
Wikipedia has a list of possible explanations.
Fivethirtyeight lists possible explanations and analysis.
Rawl and co presented five hours of testimony that the results could only be attributed to a problem with the voting machines.
What is your probability estimate for Alvin Greene's win in this election being legitimate (Greene getting lucky as a result of aggregate voter intent+indifference+confusion, as opposed to voting machine malfunction or some sort of active conspiracy)? What evidence do you need in order to update your estimate?
I put a very high probability that some form of tampering occurred primarily due to the failure of the data to obey a generalized Benford's law. Although a large amount of noise has been made about the the fact that some counties had more votes cast in the Republic governor's race than reported turnout, I don't see that as strong evidence of fraud since turnout levels in local elections are often based on the counting ability of the election volunteers who often aren't very competent.
I'd give probability estimates very similar to those of Jim's but with a slightly higher percentage for people actually voting for him. I'd do that I think by moving most of the probability mass from the idea of someone tampering with the election to expose the insecure voting machines which implies a very strange set of ethical thought processes. I've also had enough experience in local elections to know that sometimes very weird things happen for reasons that no one can explain (and that this occurs even with systems that are difficult to tamper with). So using the primary breakdown given by Jim I'd put it as follows:
Edit: Thinking this through another possibility that should be listed is deliberate Republican cross-over (since it is an open primary) but given the evidence that seems of negligible probability at this point (< .01)).
I would count that under "voters actually voted for him"
Ok. Yeah, so that should probably be a subcategory of that in that it explains the weird results in a sensible fashion.