Apples and Oranges

For John, BLUF:  If it is a statistic you have to check it from all directions and then just distrust it.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

Mark Twain attributes this quote to British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli.

Well, this is embarrassing.  This morning I texted in to City Life that Lowell had a great voter turnout.  I based that assertion on this upper left hand part of a report generated by (I would assume) Commonwealth software for local Election Commissions.

As you can see it talks to:

1. Registered Voters
2. "Cards Cast"
3. Some percentage of something

I took the "percentage" to be the percentage of voters.  What else could it be?  It didn't occur to me that it was the percentage of "Cards Cast" versus the number of Registered Voters.  It turns out that indeed that is what it was.  A perfect score would have been 200%.  The actual percentage of Registered Voters voting was closer to 36.1113%

But, even that might not be the correct answer, in that there was a difference 475 between the return of Card 1 and the return of Card 2.  Thus, for the first card, the percentage turnout was closer to 36.525%.

My bad.

Regards  —  Cliff