Project 2<!doctype html public "-//w3c//dtd html 4.0 transitional//en">Activity 1: / Name: ______</div>
2000 Presidential Election / Student ID# ______<div align=right>

Purpose: To study the Florida vote in the 2000 presidential election using least squares regression. The data can be found at

The 2000 presidential election was the one of the most contested elections ever in this country. After 36 days of lawsuits, partial recounts, and court decisions, Republican candidate George W. Bush won the state of Florida by 537 votes, which gave him the electoral votes he needed to win the presidency. A lot of attention was focused on the “butterfly ballot” used in Palm Beach County, Florida. In this and other counties, with different ballot designs, there were many disqualified votes considered “undervotes” or “overvotes” when people did not clearly pick one candidate, or picked more than one.

1.Look at the Butterfly Ballot. The first two links show the infamous Palm Beach County Butterfly Ballot used during the 2000 presidential election. The ballot has been criticized for being poorly designed on several counts. When seen at the angle voters used, the arrows do not line up with the candidates. The holes alternate between the major candidates on the left page and the minor ones on the right page, which many voters said they found so confusing, they actually voted for the wrong person. Many people actually cast two votes, apparently thinking they had to vote for president AND vice-president.

2.Get the data. Open the data file called All_Election_Data.txt. Copy it and paste it into Minitab.

  1. Under Votes. Perform a regression analysis of y=under vote vs x=total votes.

a)LSR Equation:

b)R2:

c) Identify the counties with an unusually high number of undervotes.

  1. Over Votes. Perform a regression analysis of y=over vote vs x=total votes.

a)LSR Equation:

b)R2:

c) Identify the counties with an unusually high number of overvotes.

  1. Look at the Ballot Design for All Florida Counties. What do the outliers have in common?

6. Buchanan Vote. According to news accounts, many voters in that county may have inadvertently voted for Reform party candidate Pat Buchanan, when in fact they intended to vote for Democratic candidate Al Gore. Was Buchanan’s vote in Palm BeachCounty unusually high? Perform a regression analysis of y=Buchanan vote vs x=total votes.

a)LSR Equation:

b)R2:

c)Identify Palm Beach county on the plot from its x, y coordinates. Is it unusual, and if so, in what way?

d)Find the predicted number of Buchanan votes from the equation.

e)Find the residual for Palm BeachCounty: residual = observed y – predicted y

  1. Delete this county from the data set. Re-compute the least squares regression line for predicting y=Buchanan vote vs x=total votes.

a) LSR Equation:

b)R2:

c)Describe how R2 and the LSR equation have changed.

d)Interpret the slope, y –intercept, and R2 for this LSR.

  1. Conclusion. What do you conclude about the butterfly ballot used in Palm BeachCounty in the 2000 presidential election?