GOP Primary

Great quote from How Democracies Die. By Levitsky & Ziblatt — “Collective abdication - the transfer of power to a leader who threatens Democracy — usually flows from one of two sources. The first is the misguided belief that an authoritarian can be controlled or tamed. The second is what sociologist Ivan Ermakoff calls “ideological collusion,” in which the authoritarian’s agenda overlaps sufficiently with that of mainstream politicians that abdication is desirable or at least preferable to the alternatives.” ...

ESO publication statistics compared to other observatories (Photo credit: European Southern Observatory) So I woke up this morning to find this article sitting in my queue purporting to have raw data indicating that as the population of a county increased so did the percentage of votes in the primary GOP election that were directed to Mitt Romney. The authors of the article are basically pointing out that this anomalous behavior favoring a single candidate is characteristic of a form of voter fraud called vote-flipping. Please send feedback if you have some insight into this kind of statistical analysis or voter fraud. ...