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

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (86570)	12/10/2000 5:15:02 PM
From: benwood	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

Skeets, The presumption would be that there are no problems. If a technical (i.e. not ordinary 99.5% accuracy issue) came to light, then a limited recount could be warranted. I'm thinking only of extraordinary situations -- water damage, earthquake broke a scanner before transmission of results, etc. Many technical glitches would be solved at the precinct level that night by replacing equipment or some other standard policy. So I'm thinking that a manual recount would be an obvious necessity and fairly rare, too. I specifically picked Washington State because we have upgraded equipment statewide (thank you Ralph Munro!). I think other states must come up to some reasonable level of competency, and my comments do not apply to them (I was speaking, or meant to speak, hypothetically about a rationale for ever handcounting a select group of ballots.) The 800-ballot comment going uncontested in spite of reporting doesn't mean a thing. Remember the odd thing that came up in Hillary's debate that was an urban legend (which was that a bill in the House to charge people a fee for each e-mail sent and hand it to the USPS -- truly for the gullible!) Neither the journalist, Hillary, nor the GOP candidate knew it was an urban legend. Both Hillary and her counterpart voiced their sincere position that they would not support that legislation (which was non-existent, of course). It's not easy to just say, "You gotta be kidding! That's got to be false" when you have no information whatsoever. That 800-lost to dumplicates sounds extremely implausible to me, unless of course it's only half the story (oh yeah, Gore lost mumble mumble...) I can't contest it either, except with common sense. If there's an equal probability of a Gore voter being so possessed, then the odds of all 800 being Bush supporters is 2 to the 800th power. That's an incredibly smaller chance than randomly selecting a single atom from all in the observable universe. The omission of the Gore duplicates total would only be done to misconstrue reality in order to say, "See, we lost votes to stupid voters, too," and thus sweep aside the gripe misleading information. A similar bit of information was put out by the GOP concerning the Libertarian voters in W.PalmBeach, stating that the rise in registrations of over 100% since two years ago explained all the votes, characterizing the area as a hotbed of Libertarian activity, thus purporting to explain those 4700 votes for Buchanan (or whatever the total was). They omitted the raw registration numbers, which were in the low hundreds. It doesn't look so good to present a complete picture in that light, so just leave that out and let the sheep be led. If the journalism weren't so shoddy, or if it isn't, drowned out by the shoddy masses, this stuff would never survive unchallenged. --Ben