Fun with Fitz’s data

Scott Fitzgerald went on TV the other night claiming that some people signed his recall petition “five, six, seven times.”

From our amazing data genius volunteer:

“I concatenated the petition number and row number in their database. Hundreds of “duplicates” were duplicates in their data entry. In other words, THEY entered petitions multiple times. Duh.”

“From Fitz’s database, I first removed their duplicates that his people created by entering petitions more than once (in Excel concatenate petition number and row number and use “remove duplicates” tool under the “data” tab). Then concatonate first name, last name and use the highlight duplicates tool to color those duplicates and scroll through. Not one person signed more than twice. Some of the names have more than two entries but they are different people — same name but different address. And not a lot of these.”

And what’s more, we’ve had numerous reports of people not finding themselves in Fitzgerald’s database, even though they signed the petition. As our data guru says, “There are definitely valid signatures that were missed in the data entry process. Fitz’s challenge should actually be to their own data entry people.”