Of Stats and Thefts

From Congressional Quarterly:

Of the 202 Republicans sworn in Thursday as members of 110th Congress, 15 maintained GOP control of their seats by margins of just 3 percentage points or less. On the other side of the aisle, just two of the 233 members of the new Democratic majority were winners of contests in which they retained their party’s control by similarly razor-thin margins.

This means that 7.426% of republicans were elected by 3% or less. Only 0.858% of Dems won by 3% or less. Republicans outperformed Dems by 11.5 times in these sorts of races. That is highly improbable statistically. I can think of two reasons:

1. Congressional Quarterly cherry-picked 3%. Often sports announcers say that the team has 8 wins in its last nine games, or something similar. sports fans know that this means they lost the game, ten game ago. they are 8 for the last 9 and also 8 for the last 10. perhaps had the congressional spread number been 6% or 1%, or something else, the disparity would have been minor (and as a result not newsworthy).
2. This is indicative of electoral fraud. If republicans continued their corrupt machinations, the election would look like this. The procedure for cleverly stealing an election (i assume) is that you first count the votes in secret. If your guy is ahead, you count the votes publicly and shake her hand and announce her the winner. If your guy is behind, you find out how many votes he needs to win and then make him a narrow victor. i imagine that the more you need to fudge the results the more likely you are to be caught. all this to say that a small set of the 15 republicans who won by small margins, probably should have lost by a small margin and that i am highly skeptical of the republican behavior. For a more specific example check out the story in FL-13.

If the numbers were not cherry-picked then they may very well indicate fraud, i haven't looked at them enough to have a substantial argument about whether they were presented well in the CQ article.