TG,
<<I don't agree with what you said. The margin of victory is smaller than margin of error. >>
You are absolutely correct and that is what I said..Read my post again Jozef.
I don't know how the "don't" got into my sentence, but I meant to say that I do agree with your assessment that the margin of victory is less than the margin of error, as you illustrated with some numbers.
But our agreement ends when we start to draw conclusions from the above.
As far as we talk about votes being counted or not, we have to differentiate between valid votes (readable by machine) and questionable votes.
Even if we limited ourselves to the machine readable votes, there will always be some marginal ones, which sometimes register, and on later counts may not. If you keep running these through the machines, you would always get a different count. Even if you used people, you would always get a different count, because people make mistakes as well. All the results would center around some mean, which is the one that gave Bush 930 vote lead.
When I talked about the roll of the dice, I should have said a flip of the coin, meaning that the result of the count as far as winner and loser can be either one. There is nothing in it for Bush to keep flipping the coin. He has won enough of the flips to justifiably say "stop".
Now when we get to the dimples and indentations, and reading of a voter intent from a mark left on paper by a sharp instrument, that's where probability theory ends, and politics / personal biases enter, especially in absence of any standards.
There is no reason o incentive for Bush to hope / rely on / encourage that his supporters to be more brazen in cheating and manufacturing votes. He moved to stop this exercise, and for a very good reason.
Unlike what you suggest that the manual count is like the "fine tune" dial on the radio. It is something that distorts the truth.
Speaking of statistics, if you wanted to find out the true outcome, what would you rather rely on, and honest sample of 99.9% of the voters, or a potentially tainted count of 100% of electorate?
Joe |
