(C) Center for Economic & Policy Research
This story was originally published by Center for Economic & Policy Research and is unaltered.
 . . . . . . . . . .



Escobari and Hoover’s “Difference Estimates” Are Driven by Geography — Not by “Fraud” [1]

[]

Date: 2022-11-30 16:53:29+00:00

This is the eighth in a series of blog posts addressing a report by Diego Escobari and Gary Hoover covering the 2019 presidential election in Bolivia. Their conclusions do not hold up to scrutiny, as we observe in our report Nickels Before Dimes. Here, we expand upon various claims and conclusions that Escobari and Hoover make in their paper. Links to other posts: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six, part seven, and part nine.

In the previous post, we investigated the confounding effects of rurality and socioeconomic status on a naive estimate of fraud. We noted that if we could divide polling stations into groups such that the confounding effects do not vary within each group, then we may begin to disentangle the effects of, say, Internet connectivity, on whether a station was included in the TSE announcement.

The most obvious way to manage such factors is to assume that voters within small geographic areas are effectively indistinguishable. Of course, the smaller the geographic area, the more truth there will be in this assumption. To a first approximation, we would expect voters of the same precinct to have more similar socioeconomic status or rurality than voters at different precincts, even within the same municipality. At least, we may hope.

Consider column 4 of Escobari and Hoover’s difference estimates. There, the polling stations are grouped by municipality. In practice, this meant performing exactly the same analysis as before, but only after eliminating the average differences in vote margins across municipalities. Importantly, the adjustment comes at the municipality level so that differences between polling stations of the same municipality are preserved. Because the averages depend on the weighting scheme, the adjustments will be different if we take into account the number of valid votes at each polling station.

In Figure 1, we see the unadjusted and (weighted) adjustments for polling stations at two municipalities: New York (United States) and Acasio (Potosí). On the left, we see that New York went heavily for Mesa, while Acasio greatly favored Morales. On the right, we have adjusted the margins to take into account only the differences across municipalities.

Figure 1 Official and Municipality-Adjusted Results in New York and Acasio

Sources: TSE and author’s calculations.

In Figure 2, we see how applying the adjustment to all municipalities affects the overall trend. We see that municipality explains most, but not all of the trend in support across ARRIVAL.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://cepr.net/escobari-and-hoovers-difference-estimates-are-driven-by-geography-not-by-fraud/

Published and (C) by Center for Economic & Policy Research
Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons 4.0 Int'l..

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/cepr/