Models of ecological inference (EI) have to rely on crucial assumptions about the individual-level data-generating process, which cannot be tested because of the unavailability of these data. However, these assumptions may be violated by the unknown data and this may lead to serious bias of...

Cho and Gaines have recently criticized work by Burden and Kimball on split-ticket voting in the USA, suggesting that their estimates of the volume of such voting (derived using King�s EI method) across Congressional Districts and States are unreliable. Using part of the Burden-Kimball data...