Posted by
Robert Holmes on
Nov 06, 2006; 10:59pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/voting-machine-tampering-tp522939p522947.html
The NY Times op-ed piece by Conley that Paul references above also makes the
point that counting is a statistical process. Unfortunately this is a red
herring - yes it's an effect but it is swamped by the other systemic
abuses. Here's a paragraph from a Rolling Stone piece (
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen):
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical battleground
> state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college. Officials there
> purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls, neglected to
> process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives,
> shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and
> illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A
> precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly
> high turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city
> Cleveland recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In
> Warren County, GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist
> threat to bar the media from monitoring the official vote count.
>
These are not statistical anomalies; these are not analogous to the errors
in counting Conley's "pennies in a jar". These are bad people doing bad
things and getting away with it.
Robert
On 11/6/06, Owen Densmore <owen at backspaces.net> wrote:
>
> The Freakonomics guys said at one time that we need to be clear about
> the natural errors within any system, and when the vote is closer
> than that error value, decide on what to do about a "tie" rather than
> fretting about chads, hackers, broken machines and so on.
>
> Basically voting like any other process is imperfect and trying to
> make it more accurate will never chase all the error out.
>
> That said, statistically interesting systematic errors should be
> revealing, I think.
>
> -- Owen
>
> Owen Densmore
http://backspaces.net>
>
>
>
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