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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: combjelly who wrote (128313)	11/12/2000 4:12:31 PM
From: david_langston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570449

Comb, complaining about the hand count done in New Mexico either on punch cards As far as I can determine the 38K or 68K ballots held out in Bernalillo Co. were machine-readable, absentee ballots. I don't know why they were initially held out, but most were eventually machine read. Several hundred had to be hand counted because the machines kicked them out perhaps due to folding or crumpling for mailing (I'm guessing here). I hadn't heard and didn't think that they were punch card type because punch cards require a "set up" holder and they are inherently "fragile" when compared to the optical black-mark type. Remember Bush didn't specifically ask for those ballots to be hand counted, so it can't be cited as an example of Bush hypocrisy with respect to FL hand count (you didn't, others have). I think deliberate miscounting mischief could be easy for those incompletely punched out ballots. The Democrats have made up a whole set of complicated rules to decide if a hole has been punched. There are no official hole punch rules in the state. Making up rules late in the game isn't fair. I also believe that they may be able to pull out enough votes for Gore by perfectly legal means. By hand counting they should be able to increase both candidate's votes, but because the county favored Gore, he should gain the disproportionate share of the increased vote count. The slick trick is to only do it in Democrat counties. The Republicans naively believed that if the vote goes against you after a recount - you concede. Dave

To: combjelly who wrote (128313)	11/13/2000 5:48:47 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1570449

Dear Combjelly: The problem with manual recount of PUNCHED CARD ballots is the rules by which it is done. Out of 400K ballots, a bias of +/- 0.1% yields a switch of 800 votes. Do you think that an observer would catch this error? In those that were contested, it was given to the majority, a democrat and a democratic canvasser over a republican, but clearly to be really fair, that is one that should be thrown out. If all agreed, then no problem. It is much easier to get consensus with optical ballots since the distance between two different candidates is larger than the typical error (on the one I used in Wisconsin, it is about 40:1 from where a machine would not count it for the one it is close to versus the distance to the nearest other candidate). Here, manual recounting can be agreed to by all three (one democrat, one republican, and a poll worker in either camp), and any group of reasonable people would agree as well. This is a problem with voting machines IMHO as the audit trail is more difficult to verify after the fact. Perhaps all the precincts in the country should upgrade to this system with federal financing (It may even be very popular no matter what happens next in this election) or financed by a campaign tax of 1% on all hard, soft, and issue money (given the high amount spent by all parties this year, it could pay for all the required machines and training needed to do all the precincts in the country in one presidential election year). Pete