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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: ColtonGang who wrote (71839)	11/12/2000 8:19:06 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769667

Democrat leaning precincts favor the punch card system, Republican leaning precincts have modernized. Is it too cynical to assume Democrats haven't updated because it's much easier to rig an election with the older system?

To: ColtonGang who wrote (71839)	11/12/2000 8:32:58 PM
From: david james	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Interesting story. However, I suspect that any eventual computerized system will also require a hardcopy so that they can do a hard-copy count should anything go wrong with computers involved - and we know how often that can happen. It is just too easy to hack a computer - or program a machine to be selective. Machines are certainly fallible and will usually miss significantly more entries than a human eye - yes, and they can miss perfectly valid entries. Someone should have done the statistics on these machines. Let 1000 people do a practice vote on each machine and see what percentage of valid votes get missed. It sounds like the punch machine has a higher than usual error rate but the statistics should be calculated. However, the big question is not whether the hand count method produces more accurate results (it unquestionably does and any doubts can be addressed scientifically). The big question is what distortion is created by hand counting only the democratic areas. Again, simple statistics suggests that this uniquely favors the democrats. Therefore a complete handcount would be required if the handcount in these districts alters the outcome. One thing few people are really talking about is that statistically speaking, no one won this election. All results are within the level of noise in the system. There doesn't currently exist a voting system than be accurate to the level of accuracy required for this election. This is true of both the Florida vote - and the national vote, if we decided to use that instead.