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

To: nihil who wrote (73649)	11/14/2000 9:57:09 AM
From: david james	Respond to of 769667

<There is no margin of error in a complete count. Only in a sample is there sampling error. There obviously can be miscounts, but this does not result from sampling error. Elementary statistics. > Pardon? I think you just said that if they made a complete and accurate count, then there would be no margin of error. Certainly we agree on that. However, errors result from a number of sources and miscounts are unavoidable. At the very least, you put the same voting cards through the machines several times, and you will get different outcomes. Your statistics book tells you about the sort of sampling error that results when you sample only a portion of the population and generalize to the rest. However, miscounts contribute to the total margin of error. If you could repeat the "experiment" and had everyone go out and vote again for the candidate that they thought they were voting for the first time, the result would be different. It would be difficult to make the estimate of the average error. But I suspect it is in the range of 0.5%. Nationwide, Gore has the national election by 0.2% and in Florida we are down to 0.006% or a difference of 1 vote in 15000. This is certainly far below the margin of error of even a handcount.