Again, "So far as I know, exit poll results were not released by
precincts." Heck, so far as I know, exit poll results were not
released by county. Thus, it is very difficult to correlate exit
polls to actual results.
But not impossible. This means that for a region for which you have
exit polls, you include a factor for the number of precincts in that
region that provide audit trails and those that do not.
Thus, if the fraud people are correct, a region in which 3/4 of the
precints lack audit trails should show an advantage of 3% or so for
Bush. But if the `urban legend' people are correct, there should be
no advantage. (Obviously, you cannot use just one region, but many.
The format must be one in which the inadequacies and errors of exit
polls are irrelevant, since the question is about audit-less voting.)
The second part about being correlated with audit-less voting is
simply not true. One of the biggest errors of the exit polls in
2000 was in Arizona, which did not use electronic voting at the
time.
That is an anecdotal reponse. That does not help. Indeed, because
anecdotal responses are so often used by shivs, that kind of response
suggests the opposite is actually true. (I am not claiming the
opposite is true, merely that as a rhetorical device, an anecdotal
response convinces only some people.)
There is no real evidence on tendency to vote during the time of day.
I did not know that.
My general attitude is that people who are willing to believe
conspiracy theories of this scale are generally unpersuadeable.
But are you conversing with such people? One issue is the existence
of audit-less voting machines. These suggest a less than reasonable
concern with voting security. Also, I have heard that the head of the
Diebold electronic voting company once said he hoped to deliver
elections. His machines are both audit-less and, according stories in
the Risks Digest, http://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks, can be programmed
both at the factory and on site.
Unless you think (as many do) that the eleven Republican legal suits
against Kennedy's election in 1960 were completely groundless, you
should figure that political legitimacy is helped when most people can
see that an election is free of fraud or sufficiently free of fraud
that the fraud that occurred was irrelevant. (Among other claims, one
was that fraudulent Cook County votes for Kennedy far outweighed fraudulent
down state votes for Nixon.)
The issue is not to convince a small minority of people but a sizeable
portion of the population. Perhaps they are wrong. Many people
frequently are. The issue is to convince enough of them that the
election was legitimate.
... information on voting method can be found here:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/vote/patchwork.html
That is useful. I hope that someone will be able to take that data
and with other data provide an anwwer that convinces a large enough
portion, one way or another.
... revealed a vast-right-wing conspiracy ....
That is poor rhetoric, since a conspiracy, if it exists, does not have
to involve more than a few people. It could involve more, but as far
as I can see technically it need not, and for operational security
reasons, it should not.
The issue is not that of how many ballot boxes can be stuffed, which
would require a vast conspiracy. It is how many computers can be
programmed at the factory or via the Internet or telephone line by
automated machines?
--
Robert J. Chassell
[EMAIL PROTECTED] GnuPG Key ID: 004B4AC8
http://www.rattlesnake.com http://www.teak.cc
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