According to
reporter Bob Egelko in an article in today's edition of the San Francisco
Chronicle (10/9/03) [sfgate.com], the ACLU said Wednesday that
176,000 votes were disqualified in California counties using punchcard ballots
Tuesday, more than four times as many as the ACLU predicted in a lawsuit seeking
to postpone the recall election.
However the lost
votes won't lead to a post-election lawsuit because the margins of difference
were much larger than the number of votes disqualified, the ACLU said. The
closest of the contests [there were two ballot proposotions, 54 calling for
prohibiting the collection of race-based data by the state - lost- and 53
on spending] was the governor's race, which Gray Davis lost by 711,000
votes.
The California
Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, called the election one of the smoothest in
20 years.
***
Comment:
The order of the
three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit that postponed the election based on the
speculation that the margin of error would likely exceed the winning
margin thus seems to be an object lesson in the perils judicial
activism. The size of the invalid votes was off by close to a factor of
four (40k bad votes estimated as opposed to 176k, actual) and the margin of
victory was also under-guessed by a factor of four, 176k vs.
711k.
rs
sfls
