I'm proposing a THOUGHT EXPERIMENT:
Its subject is: just how ridiculous is the attempt to discern "intent" of votes that didn't remove the chad, but only made it bulge.
My position is that there is a good argument on each side.
I also am praying, in my way and for my own reasons, that Bush will be declared the victor.
My defense of the Bush position is that on the face of it, "intent" is designed to be discerned via clean holes, not by bulges, and that the intrusion of subjective (by definition) human beings into this objective process is fraught with slippery-slope dangers, as a precedent, even if both sides are involved in the determinations.
My thought experiment explains why I don't think the rejection of "dimpled" or "pregnant" chads should be done in a spirit of high dudgeon, but rather with deep regret for the possible frustration by faulty technology of the democratic will. And why I don't think it is productive to call those who support the counting of bulges "thieves," and why I think they have a case the Bush supporters would be making were the situations reversed.
Assumptions of Thought Experiment:
1. That it is the case (as was stated by both an election official and by the inventor of the voting machine that failed to count thousands of presidential votes because the chads were only hanging or pregnant and not removed,) that the first line, the one pierced by the stylus for the presidency, has been known to work defectively (ie to not remove the chads in an unacceptable percentage of cases) due to overuse of that line over the years, and has, because of this, not even been used in municipal elections.
2. That the Yale statistician was describing the situation approximately correctly when he compared the pattern of the failures to register, on the ballot, a presidential vote in the county in question to that in other counties, and determined that the rate of omission of presidential votes registered on those particular machines was 500% higher than the rate of omission of presidential votes on the ballots processed by any other machines. IOW, that many of those people who have been insulted and ridiculed for senility and stupidity were taking an inadvertently "rigged" test of intelligence.
Further, that the statistician was correct in saying that the chance of this 500% increased occurrence of success-in-voting-on-the-other-lines-but-failure-on-the-first (worn) presidential line, being a "chance" event is less than that of his being struck by lightning five times.
Well, I've learned that people hate long posts and the preliminaries took so long that I'm going to post my thought experiment separately. |
