Paul Parker, of the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal, is the Quick and an impressive list of folks on the state's voter registration rolls are the Dead this week. Below is a note Parker posted to the NICAR-L listserv. The great thing about this is the recipe Parker provides for an analytic journalists' cookbook. Said he:
Nothing new or innovative, but we ran a dead voters story today, and
it's getting tons of buzz. I would recommend — no, URGE — everyone on
the list do the same for your area.
Here's the link:
http://www.projo.com/extra/election/content/deadvoters9_11-09-06_DN2P2GR.33b46ef.html
I know it's CAR101, but I'll outline how we did it (which is also
explained in the story):
1. Get your state's central voter registration database.
2. Get your state slice of the Social Security Administration's Death
Master File from IRE/NICAR.
3. Run a match on First Name, Last Name and Date of Birth.
4. Exclude matches where middle initials conflict. (Allow P=PETER or
P=NULL, but not P=G.)
5. Calculate a per capita rate for each city/town by dividing the number
of dead people by the total registered.
6. Interview the biggest offenders about why they're the biggest offenders.
This was so easy, and now everyone at the paper thinks I'm some sort of
journalism deity. (And the voter registration people called to ask,
“Where do I get a copy of that Social Security list.”)
As for the possibility of false positives, we pointed this out in the
story, which I think sufficed because the odds are low enough. I also
hand checked a few against our obituary archives.
—
Paul Parker
Reporter
The Providence Journal
75 Fountain Street
Providence, RI 02902
401-277-7360
pparker@projo.com
Then David Heath, at the Seattle Times layered in his experience. Said he:
We
did a dead-voter story last year after a squeeker of a governor's race.
Our
story looked for dead people actually voting. At first, we were
surprised by
the number of matches. But very few of them withstood
scrutiny. Matching a
name and a birthdate will get you lots of false
matches. You really need to
include address, which you can do in our
state where the death-certificate
database is public.
We then went to the county election board and got the
actual page voters
signed when they voted. We even looked
at absentee ballots. What
we discovered were a lot of cases where a
vote was recorded for a person
because someone else accidentally signed the
wrong line on the page —
John R. Smith signing on John P. Smith's line, for
example. Or cases
where the person scanning the data with a bar-code reader
into the
database missed and scanned the wrong line. We also found cases
where
parents and children had the same name; the parent died but the son
or
daughter was mistakenly scrubbed from the registry.
We did find a
few cases of dead people voting. Usually it was a recent
death and someone in
the family turned in an absentee ballot and forged
the signature. But you
have to be careful that a story about dead voters
isn't really a story about
dirty data.
David Heath
The Seattle
Times
