OT:Bosco,
It is human nature to let our own biases color our judgment. I expect that like any other statistical exercise, large numbers come into play to make these minor blips immaterial.
Right now, the current story out there is that the machine counting is imperfect, there were errors in designs of ballot sheets. My point is that even if the butterfly ballots yielded some Gore votes to buchanan, the probability is high that there will be other mistakes that turn them around.
Notice that some of the absentee ballots from the military do not have postmarks because the US military tried to save on stamps. Those ballots have to be ignored the same way the butterfly ballots issue should be ignored.
It is also a half-truth that Gore's camp will not pursue the butterfly ballot issue. If they lose the manual recount, I think there is a good chance that will suddenly become an issue again, just like the Bush camp will reopen the military ballots that have no postmarks. Even today, Gore's camp have people collecting affidavits from people in Palm Beach to help the legal suit pushing for a recount ---- publicly Gore asking for a Revote in Palm Beach would be political suicide, but he or his supporters will gladly help the current campaign there in any capacity.
What I have problems with is the colored biased view on good vs evil that both camps are projecting. In reality, if the tables were turned, they would BOTH be doing very similar things.
These two and the people running their campaigns have shown themselves to be very unpleasant people, and any attempts to portray them as a 'statesman' or 'visionary' or even 'moral-decent-human-being' will not succeed because people are not that stupid.
Anyone who thinks that a manual recount is devoid of human mistakes has never dealt with the fortran and cobol punch cards. And anyone who feels that human biases will not skew the results (eg : placing the votes for A into B's pile) have never studied human behaviour when the stakes are big enough. All that is happening with the manual recount is that we are trading a scientifically unbiased process for one that is subject to human whims and failings. Yet, that still has to be done to bring some closure. Most people believe that this is the unbiased approach, so it must proceed --- but statewide and under stricter controls, perhaps with full video surveilance of each counter to catch cases of deliberate fraud attempts, and a 2nd and 3rd counting from independent parties. More troublesome would be punching out chads from ballots that have not indicated a preference for any president, this is why full TAPED video surveillance has to happen in all stages of the manual counting process from the point a human hand touches a ballot to when it is counted and sorted.
As scientists and engineers, we should know better than to believe that human counting can be more unbiased than a machine one.
SbH. |
