Florida 2000 and Washington 2004

Formal standards for survey-based research are well known within the social science research community, as is the fact that they are required not only for publication, but for citation as well (AAPOR, 2005). As a social science researcher Lott would certainly have known that any study documented this poorly would have unusable in published work. Even if he did legitimately lose this documentation, he would have known that in its absence he is not entitled it as proof of his claims. Either the data and results never existed, or he was knowingly in violation of the law and nearly every social science professional and ethical protocol in existence. Over the next two years Lott changed his story several times. At one time or another he cited a myriad of sources for the data, including some that were dated after 1998 when he originally made the claim. The second edition of More Guns, Less Crime revised the "national surveys" reference to "a national survey that I conducted" (Lott, 2000). In 2002 he agreed to redo the study, and document everything properly. This time he reported having "proven" an 8 percent rate which when weighted demographically reduced to 5 percent. Once again, other researchers were unable to reproduce this result using the methods he reported. Further checks revealed that these results were also statistically insignificant and his weighting method had been done incorrectly--it actually increased his 8 percent figure to 9 percent. To this day, Lott and numerous far-Right forums nationwide are still citing this figure as a "proven" result (Wikipedia, 2005e; Lambert, 2005b).

In January 2003 Lott's reputation suffered a blow from which he has never fully recovered. Naturally, ever since the publication of More Guns, Less Crime Lott has enjoyed a huge online following. One such commentator named Mary Rosh was a regular at various pro-gun and far-Right web sites and usenet groups and acquired a fair amount of online prominence as a Lott pit bull. Rosh, who claimed to be a former student of Lott's at Stanford and Wharton was a regular at the extreme-Right web site Freerepublic.com. In 2001 she branched out to the larger Usenet community. A tireless defender of Lott's research, she hammered his critics, showered him with praise, and even penned a number of five-star reviews of his books at Amazon.com and the Barnes and Noble web site along with excoriating reviews of works critical of him. One of these which was written in the late 90's when Lott was at the U. of Chicago referred to him as "professor Lott." In another Usenet post she stated that while Lott was at Wharton he even held a chaired professorship (Lambert, 2005d). In fact, Lott has never held a full professorship anywhere and despite his prolific publishing record he has never passed a tenure review--in no small part because of the chronically flawed research and ethical questions that have dogged his professional career. He was an Olin fellow at the U. of Chicago and an assistant professor at Wharton. Rosh often praised Lott as an academic role model and waxed eloquent about how objective and non-partisan he was. According to her,

"You wouldn't know that he was a 'right-wing' ideologue from the class. He argued both sides of different issues. He tore apart empirical work whether you thought that it might be right-wing or left-wing. At least at Wharton for graduate school or Stanford for undergraduate, Lott taught me more about analysis than any other professor that I had and I was not alone. There were a group of us students who would try to take any class that he taught. Lott finally had to tell us that it was best for us to try and take classes from other professors more to be exposed to other ways of teaching graduate material."

(Wikipedia, 2005e)

She called other Lott supporters to band together in his defense. In one posting at the Far-Right web site www.freerepublic.com she called upon that site's community to download one of his papers as often as possible thereby adding to its scholarly credibility by boosting its ratings in the download counters at the Social Science Research Network.

"The papers that get downloaded the most get noticed the most by other academics. It is very important that people download this paper as frequently as possible."  (Her emphasis)

(Wikipedia, 2005e)

Rosh was even mentioned on an episode of CNN Crossfire (Wikipedia, 2005e).

But then, on New Year's Day 2003 Julian Sanchez of the Cato Institute noticed something interesting. An email he received from Lott had come from an IP address of 38.118.73.78, which happened to be identical to one used by Mary Rosh. The address had been issued by Comcast to a private account that resolved to the American Enterprise Institute where Lott was, and still is a research fellow. As a cable provider, Comcast issues unique IP addresses to their home clients, so this address uniquely identified the computer the email had come from. Further checks revealed a consistent pattern of Mary Rosh postings that also overlapped static IP addresses or dynamically assigned IP address ranges associated either with Lott's residence or his concurrent place of work (Sanchez, 2003; Lambert, 2005d).

Sanchez had discovered that Mary Rosh was none other than John Lott himself posting under an assumed identity!

He posted this discovery at his own web log site and the news spread like wildfire. Pro-gun forums angrily denied the claim accusing Sanchez and others of a politically motivated attempt to frame Lott. The argument never gained momentum however because the Cato Institute is Libertarian and staunchly pro-gun. Furthermore, the story had also been broken in the media by the Far-Right Washington Times which is owned by Rev. Sun Myung Moon whose son Justin owns a firearms manufacturing company (Kahr Arms). This dismantled any semblance of a conflict of interest. One month later Lott confessed to having invented Mary Rosh. "I probably shouldn't have done it--I know I shouldn't have done it," he said, "but it's hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously" (Morin, 2003). The American Enterprise Institute made no move to investigate Lott's actions or even to reprimand him, and to this day they have declined comment on the incident (Mooney, 2003; Wallace-Wells, 2003). As of this writing a search of the AEI web site www.aei.org using their site search engine reveals no mention of Mary Rosh.

Ordinarily, this would not be an issue. Pseudonyms are a common and generally accepted way to preserve anonymity in online communities. Lott however, had created a wholly separate identity who purported to be someone other than himself--in web parlance, a sock puppet. In Lott's case the infraction was more severe because his sock puppet purported to be an academic with a background similar to his who could vouch for his character and provide independent scholarly support for his work. To make matters worse, he repeatedly denied any involvement with Usenet discussions of his work even as Mary Rosh was rising to prominence within the Usenet community. In at least one instance he denied having any knowledge of a controversy in which she had accused a newspaper of fraudulently editing a Lott op-ed piece that contained erroneous data (Lambert, 2005e). Not only was this deceptive, it was a severe violation of scholarly professional ethics. The scientific community was shocked. In an April 2003 editorial in the journal Science editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy summarized the issue as follows,

"What [Lott] did was to construct a false identity for a scholar, whom he then deployed in repeated support of his positions and in repeated attacks on his opponents. In most circles, this goes down as fraud."

(Kennedy, 2003)

Though acknowledging his error, Lott argued that he had created Rosh with justifiable intentions. Rosh, he said, allowed him to protect his wife from threatening phone calls. She allowed him to present his views from a different perspective (Rosh professed to be a 114 lb wisp of a woman who apart from a 357 magnum would be helpless before a 200 lb attacker). He even argued that she was part of a long tradition of authors who used fictitious spokespersons in rhetoric, including Benjamin Franklin whom he called "a master of this art" (Lambert, 2005e). But these, and every other defense he gave side-stepped the fact that Mary Rosh was not merely a mouthpiece for Lott's claims but someone who claimed to be an independent character witness and who tried to boost his scholarly credibility, even to the point of encouraging others to spike download ratings of his papers.

The saga didn't end here. Soon after Lott's confession further investigations by other bloggers revealed that ever since 1998 Lott had maintained a small army of sock puppets and in fact, he had resumed an online presence with one of them the very day after he publicly confessed to Mary Rosh. Among his online identities are "washingtonian2”, “economist123”, “Tom H”, “Bob H”, “Kevin H”, “Sam”, and “Gregg." All presented themselves as independent identities purporting to be character witnesses and/or scholarly boosters for Lott's work (Lambert, 2005d). Washingtonian2 took over Mary Rosh's presence at Freerepublic.com after she moved to Usenet. Several contributed glowing book reviews of Lott's works at Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble online. At times two or three would simultaneously contribute to the same web forums. Tim Lambert of the University of New South Wales in Sydney Australia maintains an online forum called Deltoid that examines many science and policy issues. Lambert, who is legendary in the "blogosphere" for his eviscerations of Lott’s research and conduct, draws much attention from both sides of the gun control debate around the world. As recently as September 2004 I had two extended discussions with Lott supporters there only to discover later that I had actually been arguing with Lott himself speaking through "Bob H" and “Kevin H" (Lambert, 2005e). In both cases his comments were restricted entirely to personal attacks on me and other visitors at the site or peripheral details unrelated to any of his claims. Not once did he address the substance of my criticisms or anyone else's.

• Fraudulent manipulation of datasets.
• Citations to non-existent data.
• Using numerous online sock puppets to boost his standing in scholarly citation databases.
• A chronic history of flawed multiple regression studies exactly like the one he was contracted to do for the USCCR dissenters.
• A long-standing record of vociferous refusal to admit any errors in his work even after they have been demonstrated in peer-reviewed research.

According to Thernstrom and Redenbaugh, none of this is the least bit troubling in a consultant. But a few "media appearances" and some consulting work for a Democrat politician somehow proves that another scholar with no history of similar professional and ethical failures had a "partisan commitment" making him "unsuitable" as a consultant.

The fact that anyone would even attempt a character assassination on evidence like this is almost beyond belief.

In fairness to Thernstrom and Redenbaugh Lott's most serious ethical and professional lapses (including his fraudulent survey data and sock puppet incidents) were not revealed until after their dissent was published. But even so, Lott was a well-known and highly controversial figure long before the year 2000 election. The flaws in his research were well documented in the peer-reviewed literature and numerous public forums as was his fiery personality and longstanding financial and professional ties to the far-Right. It couldn't possibly have escaped their attention that he had a highly partisan background (including most of his funding base) and a record for questionable research in the very field for which they had contracted him. To this day their dissent, and Lott's contributions to it, are still being cited religiously by the Far-Right even though his professional and ethical lapses have long since been exposed (Kirsanow, 2003; 2003b; Kerry, 2004). Even if Thernstrom and Redenbaugh's had been justified in their accusations against Lichtman, it was inexcusably foolish to attempt an argument like this when their own consultant's track record was so badly marred by professional and ethical lapses.

Some spoiled ballots were deliberate abstentions

Thernstrom and Redenbaugh pointed out that there were likely to be some intentional abstentions. On page 10 they state that,

"The report talks about voters likely to have their ballots spoiled; in fact, the problem was undervotes and overvotes, some of which were deliberate (the undervotes, particularly)."

(Thernstrom & Redenbaugh, 2001)

This is of course true and they were correct in pointing out that the USCCR should have addressed the point in more detail. They also point out, correctly, that exit polls, on which most estimates of intentional abstention are based, can be quite unreliable. But none of this is relevant to their case unless they can demonstrate that apart from machine errors intentional abstentions account for most "spoiled" ballots. This was not done. In Miami-Dade County roughly one percent of all ballots cast indicated choices for other offices, but none for president (Posner, 2001). Citing these results they claim that up to one percent of Florida voters may have abstained intentionally from a presidential vote which would account for 56 percent of all undervoted ballots.