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Technology Stocks : Concurrent Computer (CCUR) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jeffbas who wrote (14718)	11/20/2000 12:28:42 PM
From: Christiaan McDonald	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21143

OT: Jeff, I agree. My feelings are if we recount the 4 Demo counties then we need to recount the entire nation. We used machines all over the country, so if they are not good enough then we should throw them all out. I don't like the "selective" recounts. I think ultimately the Supreme Court of the US will decide this and that's fine with me. I don't like 7 Democrats in Florida deciding who's going to be president. Ken

To: jeffbas who wrote (14718)	11/20/2000 5:53:56 PM
From: James M. Bash	Respond to of 21143

OT again: Jeff, the old punch cards you used in the 60's and I in the 70's had only a passing resemblance to Florida's hand-punched ballots. The original IBM technology was structurally a single, smooth piece of thin cardboard, cleanly punched through by a mechanical card-punch machine. Never any issues with extraneous marks, dimples, or "chad" - except that the latter made a pretty nice confetti at New Year's... :) And very rarely any issue with a card-reader not being able to read a given IBM punchcard. Punch card ballots are, by contrast, pre-perforated in an array of locations, which by definition can potentially comprise their surface and structural integrity. Also the ballots are always hand-punched by "feebler" humans rather than by clean-cut machines, introducing plenty of imperfect punches and extraneous matter into the process. In any event, I hope we can agree the present technology is very trailing-edge, and IMO no decent voting technology should allow a ballot to be miscast for two (or zero) candidates (even old voting booths are much better in this regard). So, the margin of error is a lot higher than it could be, and quite possibly higher than the final margin of victory for either candidate... In other words, a statistical tie. Lastly, the strategy for tackling manual recounts you mention does make sense and that is exactly what they've been doing in [the very large] Miami-Dade County, although Republicans had it halted because they said the sorting process damaged the ballots by dislodging chad... See the following link from last week and also the story attached below: New software designed to separate problem ballots Computer experts working on programs to ease reviews herald.com:80/content/tue/news/dade/digdocs/088998.htm (Hopefully, we can still agree on CCUR! ;) Miami-Dade county canvassing board to inspect ballots CNN.com - November 19, 2000 The Miami-Dade canvassing board had voted unanimously Saturday to adopt a plan that would speed the recounting by hand -- scheduled to begin Monday -- of the county's 654,000 ballots. The board planned to run the ballots through electronic vote readers Sunday to cull the 10,750 "undervotes" -- ballots for which the machines recorded no vote being cast for president. The three-person canvassing board planned to inspect those ballots individually beginning Monday morning, when 25 two-person teams were to begin reviewing the ballots in the Stephen Clark Center, a government building in downtown Miami. The remaining ballots were to be sorted into separate piles for each of the presidential candidates. Checkers were then expected to hold up one-inch stacks to the light to see if light passes through the ballots. If light does not pass through the stack, ballots will be removed and inspected individually to see whether any of the holes are blocked by chad. [ cnn.com ]