ex0820: Election Fraud
In Sleuth2: Data Sets from Ramsey and Schafer's "Statistical Sleuth (2nd Ed)"

Description Usage Format Details Source See Also Examples

The data are observations on the difference between Democratic and Republican vote counts, by (a) absentee ballot and (b) voting machine, for 21 elections in Philadelphia's senatorial districts over the last 10 years.

ex0820

A data frame with 21 observations on the following 2 variables.

Absentee: Democratic minus Republican vote count by absentee ballot
Machines: Democratic minus Republican vote count by voting machine

In a special election to fill a Pennsylvania State Senate seat in 1993, the Democrat, William Stinson, received 19,127 machine–counted votes and the Republican, Bruce Marks, received 19,691. In addition, there were 1,391 absentee ballots for Stinson and 366 absentee ballots for Marks, so that the total tally showed Stinson the winner by 461 votes. The large disparity between the machine–counted and absentee votes, and the resulting reversal of the outcome due to the absentee ballots caused some concern about possible illegal influence on the absentee votes. To see whether the discrepancy in absentee votes was larger than could be explained by chance, an econometrician considered the data given in this data frame (read from a graph in The New York Times, 11 April 1994).

Ramsey, F.L. and Schafer, D.W. (2002). The Statistical Sleuth: A Course in Methods of Data Analysis (2nd ed), Duxbury.

ex1115