I was watching the "random" drawing of letters to determine ballot order in the California primary. They had a cylindrical bingo style cage with a door in the middle. They inserted each letter of the alphabet, beginning with "A", etc into little film tubes. As they did this, the later letters naturally forced the earlier letters toward the ends of the cylinder. They then rotated the cylinder 4 or 5 times and proceded to draw the letters. Of course, the film tubes mostly rolled in place, occasionally tumbling over each other, but really not being disturbed much. The "drawer" then reached down in and pulled out a letter. The cylinder was rotated once more, another letter drawn, etc.
I said to myself, 'the chances of the first few letters coming from the beginning of the alphabet are pretty slim. <p> The letters came out as follows. R, W, Q, O, J, M, V, A, H, B, S, G, Z, X, N, T, C, I, E, K, U, P, D, Y, F and L 4 of the first thirteen letters drawn were from the first half of the alphabet. All of the first five letters drawn were from the last half. I guess my question is, is there any way to show statistically that this was not a "random" drawing? Since the starting letters get rotated among election districts, any unfairness won't affect the outcome significantly, but it struck me as a pretty shabby way to do things. I also sincerely hope the California Electoral Office does not run the California Lottery. . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
