Palm Beach Stats

[Reg Jordan]

As I understand it, it was the same screwy arrangement in '96 -- except for the complaints from the Democrats. The distribution of the double votes might be statistically interesting ( I can sense that grant applications are being completed as we speak), but the question remains: How can anyone think that he can vote for more than one candidate for President? None of these issues (double punching, voting for wrong candidate) were raised at the polling place at the time of voting. How do you associate any ballot with ANY voter claiming that he misvoted? And you're 100% correct, there cannot be a revote. Not with prior knowledge of the outcomes in the rest of the country. It's interesting that no Republicans have claimed that the ballot was misleading -- all the complaints seem to come from Democrats. Wouldn't the "misleading, confusing" nature of the ballot apply equally across the voting spectrum? reg ----- Original Message ----- From: "dennis roberts" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Reg Jordan" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, November 10, 2000 12:23 PM Subject: Re: Stats on Palm Beach votes > At 11:45 AM 11/10/00 -0500, you wrote: > >Well, let's look at that. In the '96 election, 14,000 or so ballots were > >discarded as "spoiled" because of precisely the same problem. Given the > >voter turnout in that election, 19,000 discards in this election is really > >not different than that of '96. > > did they have the same kind of screwy ballot arrangement in 1996? > > whether they did or not ... is this volume of spoiled ballots typical > across the other 66 counties? > > there is a way to see if it were just general incompetence ... by, seeing > what the double punches were ... now, if these spoiled ballots tended to > distribute their two punches all around .... say, told to vote for one only > (for some local races) but, voted for two ... then, one would not suggest > that ballot confusion led to the vote count problems ... > > but, if the two were for two presidential candidates ... buchanan and gore > for example ... i think it is much harder to wisk this spoil away due to > dumb voters > >