In article <90hi95$[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
Herman Rubin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>Having seen the pictures of the "butterfly" ballot, there
>are many other candidates as well. Not all counties used
>that particular one, but they all have many candidates.
All counties within the state will have the same set of 10 candidates
for President from which to choose (plus write-in). The structure of the
ballot, like the mechanism used for ballot, is deteremined by the 67 counties'
supervisors of elections. Only Palm Beach used the butterfly,
but other counties (Duval and I think DeSoto) continued the list
of candidates onto a second page and as might be expected, had
a high incidence of voters apparently choosing more than one
candidate for President.
>However, here is one place where I would expect inadvertent
>bias on the part of those assessing the ballot "manually"
>to show up. This makes the process quite subject to human
>error, even if there is no intentional error. We have had
>reports of one person claiming a vote intention, and others
>claiming that it was nothing of the sort.
Clearly such situations will occur as the amount of dimpling is
a continuous variable. One might argue from a statistical point of
view that a low threshold of dimpling ought to be appropriate
indication that a vote has occured; there is no a priori reason
that more voters will choose to abstain from voting in the presidential
race simply because their county has selected a punched-card method
of voting. On the other hand, one would expect the legal threshold
of dimpling necessary to cast a vote to be rather high (and indeed
it is an efficient, if not particularly fair, legal criterion to
insist that the chad be punched perfectly through in order to have the
ballot count).
dave
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