Date: Thu, 21 Dec 2000 14:09:27 -0800 From: "Crist J. Clark" <cjclark@reflexnet.net> To: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> Cc: Doug Young <dougy@bryden.apana.org.au>, Jeremiah Gowdy <jgowdy@home.com>, Jason <kib@mediaone.net>, ldmservices@charter.net, chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Will It Never End? (was Re: CA Power Shortage (was Re: Why do you support Yahoo!)) Message-ID: <20001221140927.A2118@rfx-64-6-211-149.users.reflexco>
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OK, my last one on this. Seriously. On Wed, 20 Dec 2000 20:31:23 -0700, Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> wrote, [snip] > IMHO, a revote would have been the correct solution to the problem. > An election is a data gathering process. As any scientist knows, > it is not appropriate to draw conclusions from data gathered with > so large a margin of error as to make the result inconclusive. (If you > do, you'll be laughed out of any respectable scientific journal.) > Instead, you obtain a better measuring instrument (or change your > procedure to reduce the margin of error) and measure again. But any scientist also knows that there is and will always be some margin of error in any measurement. Voting is a messy process and will always have some inherent, irreducible error. So what _do_ you do when the result falls within the noise, as it did in this case? I suppose it is possible that if you had a re-vote, the signal might emerge from the noise, but it is quite possible the outcome would still be well within the error margin. Since you are not actually making the same measurement in both cases (imagine how different the turnout would be), you cannot use multiple measurements as a way to reduce the error. I don't know of any really good answers. I guess there is always the classic fallback the Electoral goes to if no one gets a majority, toss it to the legislature. Actually, hmmm, where did I see a little discussion of reducing the error in voting... Oh, yeah, Bruce Schneier rebuttted some of those saying more computerized or (*ack*) on-line voting is a cure-all for this kind of thing in this month's Crypto-gram. > I don't like either Bush or Gore, by the way. Me neither. I guess I like Gore less, but since I excersised the option to vote for neither of Gore or Bush, I really did not have to sit down and decide which was the lesser of two evils. But it would have been nice if Gore won so that we could have split Congress and the Executive among the Dems and Reps as much as possible. Typically, the less legislation they can agree on and pass in Washington, the better. > In any event, it is undeniable that if the rules were followed -- > that is, if the will of the people had mattered -- Gore would have won. But those are _not_ the rules, and everyone knew that going into this. The Electoral College silliness is the rule, and I don't think there is anyway anyone can say conclusively that "Gore won" according to those rules. I don't think you ever will be able to say who "really" won because, as you mention, the result of the Florida vote was within the error margin which means no one actually won the Florida popular vote. The only way to settle such a vote (discounting a re-vote which has no guarantee of having a better outcome and a lot of othe thorny issues) is by an arbitrary interpretation of the results. That's what we got. And those are the rules. G.W. Bush is the President-Elect (as ironic as that title is), he really won. -- Crist J. Clark cjclark@alum.mit.edu To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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