Statement of the Problem

We chose this project over the other ideas we had discussed because we thought that this one maybe fun to do and could yield interesting results.  We are interested in this topic because the recently passed levy that had failed in the past years hit North Olmsted City Schools hard and this increased our curiosity to see if more male or females had been voting on the issues within our city.  What we are trying to see if there is in fact a significant difference between percent of males and females voting because the differences may be very interesting to us and our peers.  Do more males register to vote than women?  Many years ago this answer was obviously yes, but does it still hold true today 80 years after women’s suffrage when everyone is considered equal?  That is ultimately what we are trying to discover through this study.

Abstract

The purpose of our study was to determine if there is a difference in the proportions of male and female registered voters. After juggling different ideas to do the study on we chose this topic over the rest because we felt that the results that we would yield from this study would have been very interesting to see. We started our study by doing some background research on our topic, using Yahoo and Google as our search engines. Since our topic was on a widely researched topic it did not take us long to find similar studies that had been done in other communities, states, and even nationally. In general what we found was that females seemed to have slightly higher registration proportions but it was not consistent throughout. We also noticed that the margin of variance between to two genders got significantly closer during presidential election years. Our most extensive study that we found on voter registrations was in the state of Florida where they compared everything from location, gender, race, and plotted on a timeline dating back to 1980.

After doing the background data we were even more driven to see if North Olmsted was any different than the results which had been found in other areas. Our population of interest was residents of North Olmsted over the age of 18. We began collecting our samples soon after on two different days. We collected 82 females and 73 males from randomly selected houses on randomly selected streets. We found that 70 of the females were registered and 57 males were registered. The times we went out door to door for our samples was approximately from 4-7 on both days. We then asked the people in the house how many people in the house are female and above the age of 18. Next, we asked how many females in the house were registered to vote. We did the same thing for the male portion of our study. We did get some people who said they didn’t want to participate in this study and we recorded them as others in our data. We decided to run an unequal to 2-proportion z-test and received a z-value of -1.17 and a p-value 0.242. Since the p-value was greater than our alpha of 0.05, we fail to reject the null hypothesis. This means that we have insufficient evidence to say that there is a difference between the two voter proportion rates of males and females.