Prior to the 2012 presidential election, Pennsylvania attempted to enact one of the toughest voter ID laws in the nation. This law has been kicked up to the courts to examine its legality. One reason that so many people protested the law was because it would make it more difficult for the elderly and the poor to vote (as it would be more difficult for them to obtain the ID required). Here is an NPR story that gives a bit of background on the law and the case in court.   Also, for giggles and grins, here is Jon Stewart's more amusing explanation of the law and why it was struck down prior to the election, including video footage of a PA legislature flat-out stating that the Voter ID law would allow Romney to win the 2012 election. In order to support/raise questions about the impact of the law on the ability to vote, statisticians have been brought in on both sides in order to estimate exactly how disenfranchising this law will be. Essentially, the debate in court centers a...

This exercise encourages students to think critically about the statistics that they encounter in the media.  Note: This data is about abortion. When I use this exercise, I stress to my students that the exercise isn't about being pro-choice or anti-abortion, it is about being anti-bad statistics. Writer Sarah Kliff published an  article in Newsweek about de-stigmatizing abortion. In the article, she makes the claim that 40% of American women have had abortions. Some readers questioned this estimate. This is her reply to those readers. I challenge my students to find flaws or possible flaws/points of concern in the mathematics behind the 40% estimate. Some points that they come up with: a) The data doesn't include minors, b) the data doesn't include women who were alive between 1973 (Row v. Wade) and 2004 and but died/moved out of the US before the 2005 census data (which was used in her calculations), c) data estimates that about half of women having an abortion at...