First of all: I must say that from 1990 to 1997 i was an officer for
ballots of various degrees. In Italy the ballots are always hand
scrutined and so i can prove that errors are possible, but quite rare.
Consider however that here i scrutinized about 2000 ballots.
A good way to avoid protest was usually to meet with parties
representants and agree on how to consider doubt cases (such
signs out-of-the-box, corrections and so on).
This said i have to say that the phisycal law that say that you
cannot have an exact measurement is valid only for continuous
measurements. For discrete ones, since you can always deploy a
method that have a certain precision, this is not true.
You can have statistical errors, but are errors in the method, not in
the measurement, with integer a +-0.9 error is exact.
On 20 Nov 2000, at 16:40, Hooper, Bill and or Barbara wrote:
> Leonardo wrote:
> > Please do not flame me: But i have noted in the last two weeks
> > that in some [SE] parts of US people not only have problems with
> > fractions and decimals, but with comparing Natural Numbers too !
> Of course, he is correct. But it is nothing more than evidence of the
> basic fact of measurment (INCLUDING counting), that it is IMPOSSIBLE
> to make ANY measurement to absoultely perfect precision. There is
> ALWAYS some error.
> It is true that integers (whole numbers) are easier to count than
> rational numbers (numbers that include fractional parts to an
> indefinite number of decimal palces). But it is nonetheless true that
> an EXACTLY correct count is impossible.
Leonardo Boselli (NIT)
Dipartimento Ingegneria Civile
Universita` di Firenze
Via Santa Marta 3
I-50139 Firenze
+39()055-4796-431
