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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (85196)	11/12/2000 2:25:27 PM
From: wsringeorgia	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Wayne, you are right and I have no way of knowing if there has been any tampering and I have heard of no evidence of any either. But it may be more subtle than that; from what I know of the more modern systems tampering would be very difficult, even for a dedicated "Super McGuiver" type and hence unlikely. The error rate there would be most likely very low and the threshold for rejection of a ballot (in the event that the voter made too light a mark with the precinct supplied marker) would be VERY definite; any reasonable visable mark would register. On the older systems, well there IS by nature a need for at least initial setup adjustments and maybe a need for field adjustments later on. As time passes the light source may become weaker and a bit of dust collects on the source and the photoreceiver. Maybe in handling, moving and storage the thing gets a shaking and minutely affects allignment of the source and receiver. Depending on the age of the thing, onboard compontents, especially capacitors change in value a bit over time and would reduce sensitivity. As I see it, all these things would have the effect of reducing the percentage of "reads" in any given sample. Also paper stock selection, humidity and handling of the ballots could play a role. Like I said earlier similar systems were used in banking and data processing years ago but with an important difference; there the holes were machine punched with a solenoid driven hard steel or carbide punch and a perfectly alligned sharp edged die producing clean sharp punches. Even so there were problems; remember in the 50's EVERONE reconciled their checkbook. It would seem to the me that for any given level of machine sensitivity (original "factory" setting reduced over time for reasons given above) or "field adjusted" up or down and for whatever reason or motive that there will be in any given sample a percentage of rejects of reasonably clear punches due to "chads" fuzz or whatever. Take that SAME SAMPLE and compress it or stir it around and you will probably RAISE the reject rate on a second reading (unless you manually remove the "chads"). As the sample will show some rejects for Bush, it should show more for Gore just because in these conteseted districts he is the majority candidate. Now you know that BOTH parties have people who are master experts on all of this; who probably know the technical characteristics of every system in use everywhere. This will be interesting to watch! WSR

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (85196)	11/12/2000 2:36:29 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Wayne, I found wsringeorgia's post very interesting too; I had no idea that they were using different types of punch card readers in Democrat vs Republican districts in Florida. But I think you misread him if you though he implied that there had been any machine tampering; he only said that the older machines were more open to tampering as they had more knobs to tweak.

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (85196)	11/12/2000 3:26:47 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

Wayne - Message 14785198 The key question is whether the double punched ballots in Palm Beach county actually were a combination of Buchanon-Gore as is assumed without any independent verification, or whether most are Bush-Gore as most would likely be in case of tampering by adding extra Gore punches. If the question is not investigated, it will never be known. If the question is asked, it would be trivial to refute the theory by simply providing the full population of voided ballots for independent examination. Tampering can be done by anyone, in any county, and can even include offsetting punches for both Bush and Gore to help disguise the tampering. That said, I looked at the CNN Florida vote data for all 67 counties and tabulated the vote totals for Bush, Gore, McCollum and Nelson. (R-Pres., D-P, R-Sen, D-S) In 63 of the 67 counties the Bush vote exceeded the Republican Senate vote for McCollum by typically 10% (judged by inspection only), with a fair degree of variation. In 4 counties, the losing Republican Senate candidate actually had more votes than Bush. These counties were Charlotte, Collier, Lee, and Palm Beach. Arbitrarily assuming a 10% premium for Bush over McCollum, the degree of possible Bush vote suppression would be 5300, 6100, 12400, and 17100 votes respectively for those 4 counties. In about 56 of the 67 counties Gore ran significantly behind Nelson, the winning Democratic Senate candidate. In the remaining 11 counties, including the 4 counties above, Gore vote totals were either comparable to, or in excess of the Nelson totals. The most significant other counties were Broward, Dade, and Martin. If there were tampering, this is how it would show up as a Gore total enhancement. The proposed method of tampering would have a much lower Gore enhancement effect than a Bush suppression effect. In any case the possible Gore enhancement effect doesn't seem to come far enough out of the noise to assign any numbers, if it even exists. Some, but not all, of the above may be the result of bad data on the CNN site, which in at least one case certainly exists, although it is not significant. Regards, Don