Sociology Grad Students to the Rescue.

I really should've paid more attention in my stats classes:

In the nation's first academic study of the Florida 2004 vote, University of California, Berkeley graduate students and a professor have found intriguing evidence that electronic-voting counties there could have mistakenly awarded up to 260,000 votes to President Bush.

The discrepancy, reported Thursday, is insufficient by itself to sway the outcome of the presidential race in Florida, but the UC Berkeley team called on Florida elections officials for an investigation.

--snip--

Frustrated at the lowbrow, data-poor nature of allegations of election fraud flooding the Internet, three Berkeley grad students decided to apply the tools of first-year statistics class.

"We decided, well, you might as well test it properly instead of sitting around speculating," said first-year sociology grad student Laura Mangels. She and two colleagues downloaded voting and demographic data, ran them through statistics software and in the first night had results that produced a collective "Wow" among the students, she said.

They shopped their results to faculty and finally to Hout, a well-known skeptic who is chairman of the university's graduate sociology and demography group.

"Seven professors later, nobody's been able to poke a hole in our model," Mangels said. "Our results still hold up."

In more "voter irregularities" news: there's a recount in the works in New Hampshire and another in the works in Ohio, too - thanks to who? Nader in NH, Cobb and Badnarik in Ohio. Third Parties and Sociology Graduate Students: doing the hard work to protect Democratic votes that the DNC won't. (More on Ohio here and here.)