Political polemics have little to do with
statistics and less to do with mathematics. I
suggest, at the least, that posters on this thread
stop posting to stat.math.
Rich Ulrich wrote:
>
> On 4 Dec 2000 14:28:12 GMT, [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Radford Neal)
> wrote:
>
> < snip, some detail >
> > Let me try one more time:
> >
> > 1) A certain number of ballots will have been filled out by people
> > who HAD NO INTENTION OF VOTING FOR PRESIDENT. In a manual recount,
> > a certain number of these will nevertheless be assigned to some
> > presidential candidate.
>
> - well, zero is a number. What makes you think it will be noticeably
> above zero?
>
> Oh, well, okay, if you are shuffling 100,000 ballots by hand. But if
> you are looking through a few hundred doubtful ones as part of a team
> doing a check, I think there is good chance of zero error, or close to
> it. -- less error, probably, as you would have in feeding 100K cards
> through a card-counting machine when that is not your daily
> occupation. (You can jam the machine a few times, drop some cards,
> mis-lay a pile of cards, ... What's 218 cards for Nassau County, but
> the Margin of Machine Error? )
>
> > If they are so assigned in an unbiased
> > manner, they should split evenly. Furthermore, there is good reason
> > to think that such spurious assignments of votes will be more frequent
> > in the manual recount of ballots rejected by machine than in the machine
> > count of ballots that were regarded by the machine as unambiguous.
>
> - Bull. What are you going on about?
> Okay, the machine count, when humans don't mess up
> the bags of ballots (which happens too often) is not
> something to fight about.
>
> The ability of humans to determine most of the dented
> ballots -- yea / nay / not determinable -- is not something
> to fight about either, for the most part, if someone isn't busy
> trying to preserve a thin, accidental margin.
>
> By the way, as I understood the judge in Leon County,
> I think he has a valid, winning argument, though he might
> have botched some details:
> The judge insists that there can't be a "two-tier" system,
> that *all* votes (in some sense) have to be recounted.
> I think he is wrong if he means "every county" or if he
> means that every vote has to be hand-examined. BUT he
> is right, if he means that fairness demands that if you are
> going to search for undercount in punch-ballots, you have
> to look at all the punch-ballots that weren't counted, across
> the whole state.
> - I could imagine that being parsed a little further, so that
> any punch-ballot precinct (county?) with less than 0.5%
> blank might not need a count, since that is at the limit of the
> punch-technology. (That could also serve as a public target
> and thus an inducement for improving local success rates.)
>
> Since you ought to use the standard of "the whole state"
> (and I think Judge Sauls said that more than once),
> the Democrats failed to show that a recount might
> overturn the original outcome.
> -- It was never in the court case, but a newspaper
> report asserted that about 56% of the Gore vote
> was by punch-card, and also, Gore won about 56%
> of all the punch-votes. So, leading perhaps 560-to-440,
> Gore might expect to *gain* about 120 votes for
> every 1000 under-count votes *recovered*, state-wide.
> -- Would 5000 or so under-counted ballots be recovered,
> in a statewide recount of punch-ballot-votes-rejected-by
> machine? I would guess, "probably," but the Democrats
> never thought to press this argument.
>
> < ... Here is a bit more of Neal's curious fantasizing, with little
> apparent connection to known processes ... >
> > It would be interesting to know whether the recount is looking at
> > ballots selected by some criterion that doesn't relate to whether it
> > seemed like it might be a vote for Bush or Gore, rather than for some
> > third-party candidate. If so, one could look at the vote counts for
> > the third-party candidates in the manual recount. If the proportion
> > of such third-part votes has gone up, that might give an indication of
> < snip >
>
> Wouldn't somebody have jumped on that scandal with both feet,
> if there were any hint of it? Shoot, the Republicans have jumped
> with both feet onto scandals where they had to invent 'em first....
> Loose chad?
>
> --
> Rich Ulrich, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> http://www.pitt.edu/~wpilib/index.html
--
Bob Wheeler --- (Reply to: [EMAIL PROTECTED])
ECHIP, Inc.
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