Events

About a quarter of Americans report believing that double voting is a relatively common occurrence, casting doubt on the integrity of elections. But, despite a dearth of documented instances of double voting, it’s hard to know how often such fraud really occurs (people might just be good at covering it up!). I’ll describe a simple statistical trick to directly estimate the rate of double voting — one that builds off the classic “birthday problem” — and show that such behavior is exceedingly rare. I’ll further argue that current efforts to prevent double voting can in fact disenfranchise many legitimate voters. Speaker: Sharad Goel Paper: https://5harad.com/papers/1p1v.pdf Hosted by: The Data Science Institute Working Group on Computational Social Science In conjunction with The Columbia Population Research Center