By the way, here's what a professional statistician has to say about the Electoral Integrity Project's methods and data sets:
About that bogus claim that North Carolina is no longer a democracy . . .
North Carolina is not even the lowest-ranked state! Alabama, Michigan, Ohio, Georgia, Rhode Island, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wisconsin, and Arizona are lower.
Hmmm. Whassup with that?
Here's the international map from
The Year in Elections, 2014, by Pippa Norris, Ferran Martinez i Coma, and Max Grömping:
There's North Korea in yellow, one of the countries with "moderate" electoral integrity. Indeed, go to the chart and they list North Korea as #65 out of 127 countries. The poor saps in Bulgaria and Romania are ranked #90 and 92, respectively. Clearly what they need is a dose of Kim Jong-il.
Let's see what this measure actually is. From the report:
The survey asks experts to evaluate elections using 49 indicators, grouped into eleven categories reflecting the whole electoral cycle. Using a comprehensive instrument, listed at the end of the report, experts assess whether each national parliamentary and presidential contest meets international standards during the pre-election period, the campaign, polling day and its aftermath. The overall PEI index is constructed by summing the 49 separate indicators for each election and for each country. . . .
Around forty domestic and international experts were consulted about each election, with requests to participate sent to a total of 4,970 experts, producing an overall mean response rate of 29%. The rolling survey results presented in this report are drawn from the views of 1,429 election experts.
OK, let's check what the experts said about North Korea; it's on page 9 of the report:
Electoral laws 53
Electoral procedures 73
District boundaries 73
Voter registration 83
Party and candidate registration 54
Media coverage 78
Campaign finance 84
Voting process 53
Vote count 74
Results 80
Electoral authorities 60
Each of these is on a 0-100 scale with 100 being good. So, you got it, North Korea is above 50 in every category on the scale.
Who did they get to fill out this survey? Walter Duranty?
OK, let's look more carefully. In this table, the response rate for North Korea is given as 6%. And the report said they consulted about 40 "domestic and international experts" for each election. Hmmm . . . 6% of 40 is 2.4, so maybe they got 3 respondents for North Korea, 2 of whom were Stalinists.
That 2014 report mentioned above gave North Korea a rating of 65.3 out of 100 and Cuba a rating of 65.6. Both these numbers are higher than at least 27 of the 50 U.S. states in 2016, according to the savants at the Electoral Integrity Project.
Political science, indeed.
What went wrong here? It all seems like an unstable combination of political ideology, academic self-promotion, credulous journalism, and plain old incompetence.
http://andrewgelman.com/2017/01/02/a...r-a-democracy/
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asshurt because the smart Republicans in California bolted for greener pastures in the Midwest and Florida leaving behind mostly all liberals...
