The touch-tone screens were down in suburban Chicagoland as of 6:15 this
morning (and the number for the help desk was continuously busy) but we also
had the option of voting with paper ballots in suburban Cook County, which
Marjorie and I exercised.) Chicago proper hired a college student (trained) as
equipment manager for each precinct, which seems like a good idea. Some of my
students told me that their precincts (Kane County--next to Cook County where
Chicago is located) just shut down entirely.
Chris Newman
________________________________
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Michael Gizzi
Sent: Mon 11/6/2006 6:48 PM
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] voting machine tampering
I was impressed that when I voted on Friday (Colorado has early voting), that
the touch screen was attached to a printer that printed out each of my
responses. This was not present when voting in 2004; sure... its still
possible to mess with the system, but the print out provides a bit more
confidence on the part of the voter.
Michael Gizzi
On 11/6/06, Robert Holmes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
The NY Times op-ed piece by Conley that Paul references above also
makes the point that counting is a statistical process. Unfortunately this is a
red herring - yes it's an effect but it is swamped by the other systemic
abuses. Here's a paragraph from a Rolling Stone piece (
http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/10432334/was_the_2004_election_stolen ):
The reports were especially disturbing in Ohio, the critical
battleground state that clinched Bush's victory in the electoral college.
Officials there purged tens of thousands of eligible voters from the rolls,
neglected to process registration cards generated by Democratic voter drives,
shortchanged Democratic precincts when they allocated voting machines and
illegally derailed a recount that could have given Kerry the presidency. A
precinct in an evangelical church in Miami County recorded an impossibly high
turnout of ninety-eight percent, while a polling place in inner-city Cleveland
recorded an equally impossible turnout of only seven percent. In Warren County,
GOP election officials even invented a nonexistent terrorist threat to bar the
media from monitoring the official vote count.
These are not statistical anomalies; these are not analogous to the
errors in counting Conley's "pennies in a jar". These are bad people doing bad
things and getting away with it.
Robert
On 11/6/06, Owen Densmore < [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL
PROTECTED]> > wrote:
The Freakonomics guys said at one time that we need to be clear
about
the natural errors within any system, and when the vote is
closer
than that error value, decide on what to do about a "tie"
rather than
fretting about chads, hackers, broken machines and so on.
Basically voting like any other process is imperfect and trying
to
make it more accurate will never chase all the error out.
That said, statistically interesting systematic errors should
be
revealing, I think.
-- Owen
Owen Densmore http://backspaces.net
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============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
