Posted on January 28, 2014 by letters2pppapers There is an old proverb in English, “Figures don’t lie”. Perhaps because of the increasing use of statistics by politicians and their agents, the proverb was long ago modified: “Figures don’t lie, but liars can figure”. A later version of this saying is “How to lie with statistics”. For some reason, these modified proverbs kept coming to mind as I read the report of the Electoral Reform Association released in early December. Among its many accusations against the conduct of the 28 July general election, the ERA report includes what it considers some very suspicious numbers emerging from voter registration and the voting. The report’s authors claim to discern “unusual patterns” in the additions and deletions to the voter list in the 2012 annual updating of the list. They don’t mention the fact that the appropriate and legally specified time to raise objections to anything that seemed illegitimate about the v...
