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

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (87391)	11/25/2000 5:03:03 PM
From: E	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

You're wrong. The ancient inventor of the machine and an election official in that district both appeared at a press conference and explained that the machine was old and worn and that line one wasn't even used in municipal elections because of its high error rate where the chads getting completely knocked out by the stylus was concerned. The inventor explained it technically. It had to do with wear on that most-used line. I guess a district muddles along swallowing a certain level of poor functioning, knowing that it doesn't matter to the final result if the race is not close and you are used to using those machines and an election only takes place so rarely and in the smaller elections you can simply not use line one anyway, and other items on the budget seem of higher priority. That's the way life goes. Those machines will never be used again in an election in which line one is required, you may be sure. And just because that press conference didn't get covered by Drudge doesn't mean that that testimony won't be raised later. I'd be amazed if it weren't. But Tom: Would it change your mind, or attitude toward the voters whose votes got lost, or toward those votes themselves, if you had seen the press conference yourself, and if you accepted that those machines had an error rate 500% higher in completely punching out chads than the machines did in other voting districts, as calculated by the statistician I quoted (comparing the percentages of ballots on which only the president was left unpunched, it being 500% higher with those machines)? Just hypothetically, would it? I know you won't accept it. But hypothetically...?