[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal) wrote:
>>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>>[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal) wrote:
>>
>>> Of course, there surely must have been some legitimate votes missed in
>>> the machine recount. But there also surely must be some "votes" being
>>> counted that do not reflect the actual intent of the voter, and it
>>> seems quite likely that the number of such mis-assigned votes is
>>> greater for the manual recount of ambiguous ballots than for the
>>> machine count of ballots that seemed unambiguous to the machine. So
>>> you would *expect* the split to be closer to 50-50 if there is no
>>> bias. The question is whether the amount by which it has moved closer
>>> to 50-50 is suspiciously small. I think this can be answered only by
>>> some procedure that brings in additional information, such as an
>>> independent audit of a random sample of the recounted ballots.
>
>In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>Virgil <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
>>If the untallied votes are dimpled but not perforated, I, at least,
>>would expect 2/3 of the dimples to be in Gore chads and only 1/3 in Bush
>>chads.
>>
>>If approximately 2/3 of the tallied votes were for Gore, by what leap of
>>logic do you conclude that 1/2 of the untallied votes would have been
>>for Bush?
>
>I didn't. If you actually read the passage you quoted, you will see
>that I concluded that one would expect the division to be *closer* to
>1/2 each than for the clearly marked ballots. If you mix a certain
>number of valid ballots with 1/3 - 2/3 proportions with another group
>of invalid ballots, in which votes have been assigned randomly, in
>1/2 - 1/2 proportions, the proportions for the whole group will not
>be 1/3 - 2/3, but rather will have shifted toward 1/2 - 1/2.
True, but irrelevant. What is a better basis for estimating how the
invalid ballots are distributed than by how the valid ballots were
distributed?
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