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

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (85807)	11/23/2000 11:13:31 AM
From: George Acton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

>> i think bush's legal argument that hand counting is worse than machine counts with up to 5% error was a bad plan << The only data points I've seen on this are that machine reading of punch-card ballots has a 3% error rate, while all the other methods are about 0.3%. Even if the current margin of error is 0.3% for all votes, the margin of victory is smaller than that by a factor of 20. The best argument for the Bush I can come up with is that if the outcome was a coin toss, why is he obligated to to submit to another coin toss that is likely to be just as random. Why, indeed? OTOH, many of the ballots are of the punch-card type and manual recount should improve the accuracy, giving some hope of a result greater than statistical noise. On the third hand, these ballots are mostly in heavily Democratic counties so this introduces a bias for Gore. It still registers the intent of a voter who preferred Gore. These nerdy calculations are good for some purposes, such as analyzing how many consumers are going to buy a new brand of soap. They are worthless for other applications, like selling the soap. What people want is the feeling that a conscientious effort was made to ensure a fair result, even if it means going to a lot of trouble to produce a margin of victory that's still well within the margin of error. They do not want to watch the constitutional equivalent of an O-ring blow-out. Foreigners park a lot of money here, financing our trade deficit, because of our political stability. Right now, they don't have an attractive alternative. But it won't help our situation to decide this election using a back-up system we haven't needed since 1876.

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (85807)	11/23/2000 11:25:08 AM
From: Freedom Fighter	Respond to of 132070

Skeeter, >>i think bush's legal argument that hand counting is worse than machine counts with up to 5% error was a bad plan and most folks don't believe it.<< I agreed with the Bush camp on that one. It appears I was wrong too. The reason I thought they should stress accuracy was because I thought most people would want another verification of the count if possible - considering all the missed votes, problem ballots, and known error rate. That being the case, the only way to prevent it from being legitimate was to say a manual count is just as bad. WRONG i guess. Wayne

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (85807)	11/23/2000 3:55:33 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 132070

Right about Bush. I see him as quite a hypocrite, esp. if stuff in the LATimes Ed. is accurate, including this opening line: In Texas, vote-counters routinely count a dimpled chad as a vote for the candidate because it clearly establishes the voter's intent. latimes.com All this mess has certainly made me think that 1/2 the close elections ever held could have gone to the wrong person. What an error-prone system! Hopefully that will be the positive to come out of this. The big negative seems to be the endless post-election campaigning and pressure by the candidates themselves, completely meddling in Florida's job to produce an accurate count, via Baker, Christopher, et al., and endless legal briefs, threats, and now, for cripe's sake, threatening to have the Florida legislature overturn a possible Gore vote-majority-victory. Why, praytell, didn't they just do that on election night, it would have saved a lot of counting!<g>.