[leereeves]

What's more likely: a nationwide and unrevealed conspiracy to flip votes in favor of Romney, or that Republican voters in larger/more populous precincts favor Romney more often than voters in smaller precincts?

Edit for clarity: by larger/more populous I mean the x-axis on the graphs in the paper, though I forgot that this is only Republican voters and Republican/Democrat split in the precinct is also a factor. The x-axis doesn't necessarily mean rural to urban.

[toyg]

FTFA:

> Some argue that more liberal candidates are more popular in urban than in the rural precincts. To verify this hypothesis, we drew geographically random samples of precincts and computed partial correlations to filter out the population density factor. We will demonstrate in this paper that this factor has no impact on our conclusions.

[leereeves]

Yes, I saw that. The authors ruled out one possible explanation (urban vs rural).

Perhaps it's due to gerrymandered districts, republican vs democratic districts, large farm districts vs small towns, small towns vs large cities, or some other factor we can't think of in a few minutes.

The authors should rule out a lot more possible explanations before alleging fraud.

[hga]

They claim to address that, specifically:

Some argue that more liberal candidates are more popular in urban than in the rural precincts. To verify this hypothesis, we drew geographically random samples of precincts and computed partial correlations to filter out the population density factor. We will demonstrate in this paper that this factor has no impact on our conclusions.

I'll have to look at this in more detail when I have time.

Note also that just a few races have to be flipped, "momentum" is really critical. For instance, if they're correct and Romney didn't win New Hampshire, it's very easy to imagine him never getting decisive traction no matter how much money he threw into the campaign (one analysis I recently read noted he campaigned for dollars rather than votes, which of course was telling in the end).

[Mindless2112]

The paper refutes the argument that Romney was more popular in urban areas (see page 20 and following).