Lott's latest conspiracy theory

As well as his work on guns, John Lott has produced some bizarre claims about the Florida 2000 election. For example:

African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to cast a non-voted ballot (either by not marking that race or voting for too many candidates). To put it another way: For every two additional black Republicans in the average precinct, there was one additional non-voted ballot. By comparison, it took an additional 125 African Americans (of any party affiliation) in the average precinct to produce the same result.

So 50% of black Republican's ballots were rejected? How is that even possible? Can anyone even think of a mechanism? This is an obviously spurious correlation. Any normal person would decide that this meant that there was something wrong with their statistical model, but not Lott -- he goes ahead and publishes. His nonsense was actually published in The Journal of Legal Studies, indicating some serious deficiencies in the reviewing process at that journal.

Lott's numbers don't even add up. He states that 5% of blacks are Republicans. If 50% of their votes were rejected, that means that 50% of 5% or 2.5% of black votes were rejected even if not one black Democrat ballot was rejected. But Lott claims that 1 out of 125 (less than 1%) of black votes were rejected. I guess the rejection rate for black Democrat votes must have been negative.

See Allan Lichtman for more on Lott and Florida 2000.

Which brings us to the Minnesota senate election. After his incompetant and partisan work on Florida, he was of course chosen by Fox as their expert commenter on the recount.

Nate Silver finds Lott accusing the Canvassing Board of counting on obvious Coleman ballot for Franken:

So where did Lott get the idea that the vote had been counted for Franken? Apparently from the Star Tribune's website, which had it listed it that way. The Star Tribune, keeping an unofficial tally of more than 6,000 challenged ballots, apparently made a boo-boo.

This possibility appears not to have crossed Lott's mind. Faced with two alternatives...

  1. The Canvassing Board somehow determined that this was a Franken ballot;
  2. The Star Tribune screwed up.

...Lott took Occam's Razor and cut himself with it, and concluded that the former must be true, using it as his primary piece of evidence to allege the recount was slanted in Al Franken's favor. The ballot is now featured prominently on the front page of the FoxNews.com website

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Allan Lichtman posts on spoiled ballots in Florida 2000. (Hat tip: Ralph Luker). He rightfully refers to Lott's claims about ballot spoiling as "bizarre". Lott claims: African-American Republicans who voted were 54 to 66 times more likely than the average African American to…
Lott has responded to Media Matters criticism of his comments on Florida 2000. Lott writes: Media matters makes it look like I was talking about "voter disenfranchisement" (which I assume includes the non-voted ballot issue) by adding into what I said the broader statement "[on voter…
Most of the work related to the ongoing recount in the Minnesota Senate race ended week when the canvassing board went through almost all of the challenged ballots, assigning them to either Franken, Coleman, or "other." Many ballot challenges issued earlier by one campaign or the other were…
Update: Franken is ahead by 249 votes !!! UPDATE: DONE with the Franken re-entered (some withdrawn) ... now looking at some ballots that were set aside earlier. UPDATE: ... bam... the canvassing board just threw out consideration of all the duplicate ballots except seven that have some…

This is how I view J. Lott Jr.

You now I was just going to joke about hard it would be to determine many commenters' Lott Number (a la the Easterbrook number) because a lot of them we'd think would be 1 would actually be 0.

This might be worth working up and submitting as a comment to the JLS.

By John Quiggin (not verified) on 23 Dec 2008 #permalink

YOU ARE AMAZINGLY DISHONEST. HAVE YOU ABSOLUTELY NO SHAME?

I had him for a PhD level empirical methods class and I have to say that he was the best professor that I ever had. You wouldn't know that he was a "right-wing" ideologue from the class. He argued both sides of different issues. He tore apart empirical work whether you thought that it might be right-wing or left-wing. Lott taught me more about analysis than any other professor that I had and I was not alone. There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material.

By Mary Rosh (not verified) on 23 Dec 2008 #permalink

Mary Rosh.

Can you explain exactly how Tim Lambert is being dishonest?

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 23 Dec 2008 #permalink

BJ, that was an homage to a certain sock puppeteer. And a good one -- kudos.

On Lott and elections, the man's FL work is just insane. My wife couldn't even engage it, it was so at variance with everything she knew. At the time he published that paper, she was working on elections and rejection rates and going to methods conferences as an actual tenure-track professor at a top-ten department in polisci. Lott is an economist, whose CV shows zero tenure-track positions, and no subject-matter experience in the field.

He makes money off his books, I am sure, which is good for him. In a meritocracy, he'd probably never work again. Lucky for him, right-wing nutjobs apparently receive an unending stream of politically subsidized positions from Fox, Olin, Hoover and friends.

Surely even Lott is not so stupid as to be still using the Rosh sock. That bird has long flown.

By Doug Clover (not verified) on 23 Dec 2008 #permalink

MS. Rosh's post is a verbatim quote, IIRC.

Lott is full of crap as usual. However things are pretty dicey in MN. I turn to www.powerlineblog.com which is run by guys local to MN for my election info. So far they have provided honest coverage. Biased a little to the right in this case, but fair, I think.

'Twill be a great shame if Franken is elected to the US Senate. And it's going to come down to 50 ballots or less.

Doug Clover echoes my initial sentiments: surely not even Lott would be so ridiculously stupid as to employ his embarrassing old sock-puppet to accuse, without substance but with extraordinary hypocricy, someone else of dishonesty?

If it was Lott I am astonished that he reponded to Tim's posting a mere 14 hours after it was made - the guy must have a pathological craving for attention. I suspect though that WCW has a finger on the pulse, and that it was a different puppeteer - which in a way disappoints me, because I would have loved reading Lott's version of Mary explain how her wonderful professor was right and Tim was not.

I wish the 'real' Mary would 'fess up, because I would like to know who managed such a good job on the fawning undergrad ditz persona!

Whomever it was, in the end it says it all about Lott though, doesn't it?

By Bernard J. (not verified) on 24 Dec 2008 #permalink

Ben ... dear Ben ...

So far they have provided honest coverage. Biased a little to the right in this case, but fair, I think.

Their coverage is honest, well, a little bit dishonest, but fair in a slightly dishonest way...

'Twill be a great shame if Franken is elected to the US Senate.

Hate democracy much, Ben?

Besides, you've got your tense wrong ... Franken *was* elected to the US Senate. Deal!

I think it is reasonable to assume that when ben says 'fair', he means light-skinned.

By luminous beauty (not verified) on 24 Dec 2008 #permalink

They would bet away with it if they could, however social media marketing and campaigning is becoming a real leveler for these sick plutocrats.

Long may it continue!

Wise words, Tim.