Author: Violet

I’ve put together a set of charts showing how quickly absentee ballots were returned, along with an examination of the characteristics of people who failed to return their ballot at all. My goals: 1) Convincing everybody that people do not generally return their absentee ballots right away – the supposed rule of thumb that half…

I’ve previously explored the statistics of recounts, trying to get a handle on how much we can expect a close election result to change, if the election night tabulation errors are carefully corrected.  Based on data collected by the Michigan Election Reform Alliance, in two elections in Allegan County, the answer seems to be about 5 votes…

I’ve been thinking about building a statistical model of recounts, to make it possible to estimate probabilities that the outcome of an election would be reversed under various conditions.  It’s impossible to do a rigorous test, since it’s not clear what statistical model might be appropriate, and we haven’t have adequate data for a rigorous…

I’ve just run into one of those simple ideas that make me wonder why I didn’t see it myself, and makes me regret all the effort I wasted before I learned about it. In a horserace poll, we want information that will predict who will win the election, or some closely related measurement like the…

Everywhere a liberal / Democrat / progressive looks, you see evidence of seething anger at Governor Snyder and his allies.  Planning for demonstrations has put holiday preparations on hold in thousands of Michigan households. The legislature – none too functional on its best days – has reached new depths of snakepitness.  And soon there will…

I hate to agree with anything that appears in the Detroit News; it always makes me wonder whether I’m being suckered.  But it may be true that Michigan voters are shifting toward the Democratic alternatives in each of the 110 races for state representative on the ballot this fall. At PPC, our polling is almost always centered…

PPC has run dozens of cheap robo-polls for various clients, looking toward today’s primary election. Just for the fun of it, I thought I’d post all our polls which were conducted in the past 30 days and reported in the media.  I may have missed a few, but these were gathered by searching Google/News and…

To quote from MIRS:  “BREAKING NEWS: SOS: McCotter Short on Sigs -U.S. Rep. Thad McCOTTER (R-Livonia) does not have the 1,000 valid signatures needed to make the 2012 primary ballot, according to a Secretary of State (SOS) spokeswoman this evening.” If this is correct, all hell is abour to break loose.  For one thing, there’s…

We previously invited guesses about the distribution of delegates in Tuesday’s election, and now we’re in a position to assess – and laugh at – those who showed the courage to participate. As previously announced, each correct guess was worth one point,  each incorrect guess cost two points, and there was no penalty for leaving…

At first, the official position of the Michigan Democratic Party was that anyone who was caught voting February 28 should be drawn and quartered.   Since that was beyond the MDP’s power, the penalty was simply being excommunicated, and forbidden to participate in such activities as the May 5 caucus. Then, the word came down…