Undervotes are represented by vote cards which
have no punches for a presidential candidate -- at
least none that were detected by tabulating
machines. It is reported that there are some 28000
of these in the three contentious Florida
counties.
Because these counties seem to have favored Gore
more than Bush (by 69%,54% and 64%), the Democrats
believe that manual inspection of these cards will
result in votes for Gore. The Republicans fear
this. Is there any statistical justification for
these views?
There are two possibilities: (A) a vote was
attempted; (B) no vote was attempted. Let us
assume that for (A) the probability of a Gore vote
is 0.62, and 0.50 for (B), then if V is the
proportion of the 28000 corresponding to (A), one
has the mean vote for Gore being
28000(0.62V+0.50(1-V)), and similarly one can
obtain a SD. One finds:
V Delta
0 0
0.1 336
0.2 692
0.3 1008
where Delta is the incremental number of votes for
Gore. Since the SD in all cases is about 84 votes,
it may be seen that V must be in the neighborhood
of 0.3 before Gore will pick up enough votes to
overcome the 960 vote lead of Bush.
Is this likely? Early results from the counts seem
to suggest it is not.
--
Bob Wheeler --- (Reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
ECHIP, Inc.
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