Getting Elected at Cornell

A Democratic Party operative has figured out a way to literally win a victory in class that he could not achieve at the polls.

Political Science professor Walter Mebane asked the students in his Campaigns and Elections class to examine the controversial recount of the vote in the 2000 presidential election. “I should warn you that I was an organizer for Gore in Florida,” the Cornell professor good-naturedly told his class.

It was a warning the students should have taken seriously. “I did the research and found that everything was okay,” one student remembered. “So I took my C+ and went home.”

Clearly, this student’s analysis, though backed by every available study, was not the outcome the professor desired. But the student arrived at the only conclusion that the evidence warranted.

“A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U. S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president,” CNN reported in 2001. “The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies including CNN.”

“NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots.”

That study, of course, was released after the U. S. Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote, certified the election results in December of 2000. Moreover, most surveys show that the same media outlets that commissioned the study tilted toward the Democratic candidate, then-Vice President Al Gore, in their coverage of the campaign itself. The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University probably provided the most scientific report on media coverage in that electoral contest.

Of the Florida ballots that CNN reported on, the network did offer a caveat. “The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators,” CNN reported.

“In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties’ inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.”

And how “instructive” and “definitive” is Dr. Mebane? Opinions, as registered anonymously by his students on ratemyprofessor.com, run in his favor:

• “Go to his office hours. He’s a lot more approachable than he seems. If you tell him what you’re interested in he’ll send you a lot of e-mails about it. If you e-mail him at 3:00 AM, you’ll get a very useful response at 3:10 AM.

• “The systematic and methodological rigor of this man and this course is overwhelming. That said, he is approachable, you just have to be willing to question everything you do not understand—he is more patient than he seems. Great seminar, would take again. Learned a lot.

• “Worst professor I’ve had yet at Cornell. Awful at lectures, relies too much on stats and not enough on government. Very politically one-sided and close-minded, yet thinks very highly of himself. Not very approachable.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the executive director of Accuracy in Academia.