Seminar on Tuesday in the Bay area on electronic vote tampering, using the RR as an example

January 24, 2005

If you are anywhere near San Francisco/Palo Alto: Seminar on detecting electronic vote tampering


Tomorrow afternoon, Prof. Jonathan Taylor of the Department of Statistics at Stanford University, will be given the seminar described below. Dr. Taylor was consulted right after the recall vote by the Carter Center to verify the statistical probability of some anomalies in the recall data reported in the Venezuelan press (and blogs!). Prof. Taylor briefly reported in his website then that his results “should not be interpreted as overwhelming evidence of fraud” in the Venezuelan election, which later was toned down by removing that word.


 


I encourage anyone in the Bay area interested in the problem (or our problems!) to go to the seminar and send in to us your impressions, comments and the conclusions reached at the talk. Here are the details:



STANFORD UNIVERSITY


DEPARTMENT OF STATISTICS


DEPARTMENTAL SEMINAR
 
   4:15 p.m., Tuesday, January 25, 2005
   Sequoia Hall Room 200
   {(Cookies at 3:45 in 1st Floor Lounge)
 
   Jonathan Taylor
   Department of Statistics
   Stanford University
 
   Detecting electoral fraud: a case study from Venezuela
 
   Abstract:
 


In this talk, we superficially address the general problem of detecting   electoral fraud, specifically electronic vote tampering. While there have been many allegations in recent months, we focus on a particular case in which the data is relatively clean: a recently held election in Venezuela to decide whether or not to recall sitting President Hugo Chavez.


The talk focuses on describing some of the political context, the dataset and a simple Poisson model for a “fair” election.

This entry was posted on January 24, 2005 at 9:39 pm and is filed under Venezuela.

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