When Data Attack

Florida never ceases to amaze. As one of a handful of states that refuse ex-felons the right to vote, Florida shaved the course of the 2000 election with a remarkably flawed ex-con database. The state corrected its rolls for 2004—so they said, because only after a successful lawsuit by CNN did Florida finally release the purge list that was supposed to exculpate the state's methodology.

The results did not inspire confidence. Of 47,000 names collected in a state where one in five citizens is Hispanic, just 50 names on the list were Hispanic. 20% of the population is Hispanic, but only 0.1% of the state's ex-felons are the same? It does not take much of a conspiratorial leap to recognize that the data are populated nearly entirely by Democratic-leaning minorities, while Republican-voting minorities have been granted a reprieve.

From work experience I know that race status presents real difficulties in this sort of demographic data collection. Unlike white or African-American variables, Hispanic variables aren't (or are rarely) binary. This would be problematic even for heavily Cuban Hispanic Florida, where Puerto Ricans, Santo Domingans, and a handful of Mexicans would occupy the same race variable.

This sort of data error you notice and then correct. Bureaucratic organizations and contracts exist in order to ensure data quality, even if there's no simple solution for many database problems. I know, for example, that a recent national estimate regarding cancer data employed a Hispanic-race variable that wrought normal values throughout the nation, with the exception of one state, in which the variable doubled the Hispanic population. Still, data collection problems at the national level—which are in part produced by a bevy of binding state laws—wouldn't be encountered at the state/county level. That the state does not answer to anyone but the press over the quality of its data strikes me as an enormous problem that you wouldn't find at the national level, where data are required to meet certain standards.

Even accepting some global data incompetence on behalf of the state—the state kept its records secret. The press had to sue the Sunshine State to shed some light on records that were intended to vindicate the state to the people and its press. And these aren't records that are normally kept secret—that was a completely unique provision this time around. It's just too damned difficult to do the gymnastics to prove that there's a good explanation for what very much sounds like corruption.

(Check out Legal Fiction and Billmon.)