>> i think bush's legal argument that hand counting is worse than machine counts with up to 5% error was a bad plan <<
The only data points I've seen on this are that machine reading of punch-card ballots has a 3% error rate, while all the other methods are about 0.3%. Even if the current margin of error is 0.3% for all votes, the margin of victory is smaller than that by a factor of 20.
The best argument for the Bush I can come up with is that if the outcome was a coin toss, why is he obligated to to submit to another coin toss that is likely to be just as random. Why, indeed? OTOH, many of the ballots are of the punch-card type and manual recount should improve the accuracy, giving some hope of a result greater than statistical noise. On the third hand, these ballots are mostly in heavily Democratic counties so this introduces a bias for Gore. It still registers the intent of a voter who preferred Gore.
These nerdy calculations are good for some purposes, such as analyzing how many consumers are going to buy a new brand of soap. They are worthless for other applications, like selling the soap.
What people want is the feeling that a conscientious effort was made to ensure a fair result, even if it means going to a lot of trouble to produce a margin of victory that's still well within the margin of error. They do not want to watch the constitutional equivalent of an O-ring blow-out. Foreigners park a lot of money here, financing our trade deficit, because of our political stability. Right now, they don't have an attractive alternative. But it won't help our situation to decide this election using a back-up system we haven't needed since 1876. |
