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The
ACLU's assertion appears to be based on an estimate made by Professor
Brady. Has anyone seen the evidence to support this factual
assertion? If true, and assuming that 44% of the state's 10 million voters
who went to the polls were in the punchcard counties, that makes for an error
rate of 4%, more than double the error rate that prior students had shown.
Is Professor Brady simply basing his claim on differential between those who
voted on the recall question and those who voted for a replacement
candidate? If so, is there any reason to think that it was error rather
than intended undervote?
John C. Eastman
Professor of Law, Chapman University
School of Law
Director, The Claremont Institute Center
for Constitutional Jurisprudence
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
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