PRESTOPUNDIT -- "An intense brain-buzz, guaranteed" (2blowhards)

More politically inspired "science" from Berkeley's Professor Henry Brady. Mickey Kaus is on the story:

Punch-card foe Henry Brady of Berkeley now claims that 176,000 votes were lost in the recall election due to punch-card balloting systems. But if the S.F. Chronicle's report is right, he gets this figure by comparing total ballots cast with total votes on the yes/no recall. Ballots without a vote on the yes/no question are presumed to be votes that were cast but somehow not counted due to malfunctioning voting mechanisms. But why weren't they intentional abstentions--for example, Latino Bustamante voters who hate Davis but couldn't bring themselves to vote "yes" on the recall, or who just rushed to the second part of the ballot? Here's the Chronicle's explanation:

Part of the difference resulted from voters who chose not to vote on the recall, but based on past experience, most of the disparity consisted of votes that were cast but not counted, Brady said.

I don't see how Brady knows this. True, the number of "missing" votes varies between counties. But the big counties with punch cards (i.e. Los Angeles) also seem to be counties with large Latino populations that may have abstained in the manner described above. Brady would have to figure out some way of correcting for the proportion of Bustamante voters, or any other supporters of other candidates who might abstain on some other basis. That L.A. County showed even more missing votes than other punch card counties ("nearly 9 percent" versus an average of 7.7 percent) suggests that some factor other than punch cards was at work. ... I await Prof. Hasen's upcoming column, or a link to Brady's full study. But a previous Brady anti-punch-card study was so flawed it left Harvard Prof. Laurence Tribe, who had to defend it in court, humiliated on national television by Judge Alex Kozinski. And Brady's rush into the headlines--in time to let the obnoxious ACLU attorney Mark Rosenbaum declare a "defacing of democracy"--is not reassuring. ...