A friend of mine brought an article to my attention about untraceable ‘unemployed’ donors. It raises concerns about potentially fraudulent campaign donations. The article shows that, according to FEC records, ActBlue is receiving many donations from the unemployed, more so than another PAC, WinRed. The article goes on to suggest that many donations may have …
Category Archives: Politics
Finding Unusual Voters
The last two big U.S. elections have rekindled discussion of voter fraud. There have been claims that non-citizens are voting, of people voting more than once, and of dead people voting. I wondered if any of these claims could be tested by analyzing publicly available data on voter registrations and history. To this end I …
Etymology of “assault rifle”
An interesting meme in the gun debates in the United States is that “assault rifle” is a made-up term created recently by the left for political purposes (e.g., Twitter). Having encountered the term often enough in other contexts, I was surprised by this assertion. According to Google Ngram Viewer, which can search many older texts, …
Dingell’s Number
There is an interesting gun meme in the United States. I started noticing it a few years ago and now I see it everywhere. The meme has the following structure: “There are already over 20,000 gun laws in the United States. How will adding more laws help?” (Other common variants use 21,000, 22,000, 25,000, and …
Encouraging People To Vote
Poking around more with the Florida voter data, I found that of the over 13 million active registered voters in Florida, 2,254,591 of them have no history of ever having voted. 162,883 of those who have no history of ever having voted have recorded an email address when registering to vote. On Monday, November 5th, …
2018 Florida Midterm Voter Statistics
I have been tinkering around with ways of exploring voter data. I thought I would share some of what I find interesting in the context of the 2018 Florida midterms. One thing I am curious about is whether or not the results of the previous election will encourage more people to vote. Florida Voter Registrations …