I took a good look at the canvas report this morning. I was especially interested in the idea of there being about 173K lost votes - that is, votes cast that were not counted.
Here is the table from the report on this. The data is broken down by precinct, but overall it shows that they interviewed 964 people that Maricopa County says
did not vote, and 330 (
34.23%) told the canvass volunteers that they in fact
did vote. So the 173K is an estimate for the full county based on this result.
- Lost votes table.JPG (83.85 KiB) Viewed 1171 times
The authors of the report are apparently unaware of the well-established fact that many people - when asked if they voted in a recent election - will lie and say they voted when in fact they did not. Here is a blurb from a 1986
American Political Science Review article providing some findings on voter validation work from the University of Michigan:
- APSR.JPG (115.5 KiB) Viewed 1171 times
Another issue - in order to derive a meaningful estimate from any survey, one needs an appropriately drawn probability sample. There is no methodological detail provided in the report, so it's not clear this was done. For all we know, the volunteer canvassers selected homes to approach in a willy-nilly fashion ("Those folks look friendly, let's go talk to them!")