[ALSC-Forum] Draft report - statistics and "fraud"

[Adam PEAKE]

ALSC, congratulations on a thought provoking draft. An enjoyable and
informative read.  

One quick comment, and I apologize for beginning with a negative.  I was
disappointed to see that you seem to have picked up on a very
regrettable interpretation of 2000 election statistics and wrote "at the
conclusion of registration 33,043 registrations, or 18.7%, were removed
from the valid records database because of real or suspected fraud."

As your draft explains, "9,721 pin letters were returned (as of August
19, 2001), 92.2% of which had been sent to countries in the Asia region
... raises questions about the efficacy of postal mail" These 9,721 are
included in the 33,043 registrations you suggest may be fraudulent. 
Since when was "return to sender" and indication of fraud?

<http://www.atlargestudy.org/stats/summary1.shtml>

Email bounces, 3,217.  So email bounced, it often does, particularly in
developing nations on flaky connections.  Should we suspect fraud?

Bad format, 2,720.  As you say, "Systems were under-designed and
vulnerable, with several occurrences of denial of service, including
2,800 At-Large members who received an error message when attempting to
submit their votes".  Are these 2,720 the 2,800 mentioned here? Fraud,
system error or someone's poor typing? 

I am sure among the other categories (administrative holds, and, perhaps
significantly, duplicate entries) there are some that we might suspect
to be fraudulent, there are probably some that can be shown to be
fraudulent. But without knowing more, and seeing how some of the
statistics we do understand have been misrepresented, I can't help but
wonder if many duplicate entries might be the result of system timeouts
and people retrying to enter data or some other benign reason.  

Did election.com release a report on the election and are there any more
statistics (with explanations) we can be shown?

Please correct the section in the draft about real or suspected fraud,
it clearly isn't justified.

Kind regards,

Adam

Adam Peake
GLOCOM  Tokyo