The analysis was not peer-reviewed, although Hout and the students said that seven professors examined their numbers. They would not speculate about what occurred with the voting machines, but voting activists on internet forums seized the study as proof of faulty voting machines or election fraud. Drexel University's McCullough, however, found fault with the study.

"What they did with their model is wrong, and their results are flawed," McCullough said. "They claim those results have some meaning, but I don't know how they can do that."

McCullough said they focused on one statistical model to conduct their analysis while ignoring other statistical models that would have produced opposite results.

"They either overlooked or did not bother to find a much better-fitting (statistical) regression model that showed that e-voting didn't account (for the voting anomalies)," McCullough said.

Charles Stewart, an MIT political science professor, called the study "the type of exercise that you do in a graduate data-analysis class" rather than as an academic paper.

"If I were to get this article as (an academic) reviewer, I would turn it around and say they were fishing to find a result," Stewart said. "I know of no theory or no prior set of intuitions that would have led me to run the analysis they ran."