About a quarter of Americans report believing that double voting is a relatively common occurrence, casting doubt on the integrity of elections. But, despite a dearth of documented instances of double voting, it’s hard to know how often such fraud really occurs (people might just be good at covering it up!). This talk will describe a simple statistical trick to estimate the rate of double voting — one that builds off the classic birthday paradox — and show that such behavior is exceedingly rare. It will be further argued that current efforts to prevent double voting can in fact disenfranchise many legitimate voters.

Bio:

Sharad Goel an assistant professor at Stanford University in the Department of Management Science & Engineering, in the School of Engineering. He has courtesy appointments in Computer Science, Sociology, and the Law School.

Sharad looks at public policy through the lens of computer science, bringing a computational perspective to a diverse range of contemporary social issues. Some topics he has recently worked on are: policing practices, including statistical tests for discrimination; fair machine learning, including in automated speech recognition; and U.S. elections, including swing voting, polling errors, voter fraud, and political polarization.

He founded and directs the Stanford Computational Policy Lab. The Lab is a team of researchers, data scientists, and journalists that address policy problems through technical innovation. For example, they recently deployed a “blind charging” platform in San Francisco to mitigate racial bias in prosecutorial decisions.

Sharad also writes essays about policy issues from a statistical perspective. These include discussions of algorithms in the courts (in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Boston Globe); policing (in Slate and the Huffington Post); mass incarceration (in the Washington Post); election , polls (in the New York Times); claims of voter fraud (in Slate, and also an extended interview with This American Life); and affirmative action (in Boston Review).

Sharad received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from the University of Chicago, master’s degree in computer science and a doctoral degree in applied mathematics from Cornell University. Before joining the Stanford faculty, Sharad worked at Microsoft Research in New York City.