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 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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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