Abstract
Abstract We offer a simple use of Bayes' Theorem to model the relationship between surname and ethnicity in order to improve present expert witness practices in voting rights litigation. Our aim is to show how to better estimate the overall Hispanic share of the electorate to determine realistic opportunity to elect candidates of choice. We show that there is no such thing as the proportion of bearers of a given name who are Hispanic. How “Hispanic” any given name turns out to be is a function of the overall Hispanicity of the population, which affects both the distribution of names and the conditional probability that the possessor of any given name will be Hispanic. Because of this, the number of names on a surname list (say that of registered voters) that should be counted as Hispanic is not fixed, but rather varies by demographic context. We show how to identify the optimal size of a surname list by balancing false positives and false negatives. We also provide some “quick and dirty” approximation met...
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