[sherburt3]

If someone modified the original dataset and it was discovered they would be held accountable. However if you have a departmental policy of modifying the data for "privacy reasons" and it just so happened to surrepititiously affect some sort of political outcome then ah geez that just a wacky coincidence not any individuals fault.

[shiandow]

You shouldn't base political decisions on stuff that falls within the margin of error.

Anyway you either ensure any analysis is reproducible or not, if adding noise is one of the steps just make sure to fix the seed.