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Suffolk Exec Levy Distorts Stats on Popularity with Latinos

Posted October 20, 2009 by Ted Hesson
Categories: Suffolk

They say numbers don’t lie. But people can lie about numbers.
Yesterday, Suffolk County Executive Steve Levy issued a press release stating that he is “very popular” among Hispanic voters. The press release cited statistics from a recent poll by the Siena College Research Institute that said he had a high favorability rating among Hispanics.

But those numbers don’t add up.

Only 37 Hispanics were interviewed in the poll, and of those Hispanics interviewed, only 29 were from Suffolk County. A representative from Siena College said that any conclusions drawn from the Suffolk County sampling would be subject to a “very large margin of error.”

The representative added that Siena typically interviews 620 people to produce an accurate poll, and that the statistics that Levy referenced in his press release were from a smaller, less accurate subset.

Don Levy, the director of Siena’s research institute, said that regarding the Hispanic subset information, he told Newsday—which collaborated on the poll with Siena—that “given that small of a sample, it’s inappropriate to shine a light on it.”

County Executive Levy’s press release is an egregious distortion of the facts. As a seasoned politician, the county executive and his staff must be well versed in the science of polling, and should have known that a poll like this was inaccurate. Anyone with a basic knowledge of polling would realize that the sampling wasn’t large enough to draw adequate conclusions.

But Levy’s camp decided to issue a press release anyway—piggybacking on numbers that they must have known were faulty.

Newsday reported that those particular statistics were invalid, saying that, “Pollsters said the proportions of Hispanics and Asians - 4 percent and 1 percent, respectively - were too small to draw solid conclusions about their views.” However, News 12—which was also involved with the poll—reported the invalid findings about Levy and Hispanics without citing the huge margin of error.
In Levy’s press release, he is quoted as saying, “Despite the negative reports from extremist groups and a handful of illegal immigration advocates, this poll shows that our policies have been accepted across the board by the people of Suffolk County.”

All the poll data proves, though, is that the county executive’s math is as faulty as his policies. To go on the record with such an obvious distortion of the truth shows Levy’s disregard for his own constituents, and desire to gloss over the anti-immigrant policies and rhetoric that have defined his tenure as county executive.

Siena’s Don Levy said in plain terms that while the data on Hispanics in Suffolk may be intriguing, it’s not nearly comprehensive enough to highlight as definitive.

“I wouldn’t go out with a press release on 37 people,” said Levy. “But he did…It’s always interesting in what I do, how people pick and choose what they want to highlight.”

Tags : latinos, levy, statistics

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