Slashdot Mirror
Statistics, Elections, Frustration
The word is that the Florida recount will be completed later today (before 5 EST). In the meantime, a couple of interesting bits
related to math (which seems much more appropriate to Slashdot ;) The big one is of course the 'Voting Irregularity' in Palm Beach where supposedly thousands of seniors voted for Buchanan due to a badly designed ballot. this report (unfortunately, its a PDF) breaks down the returns on various counties and pretty much proves that something was wrong. Any math folks out there interested in doing their own take on the numbers?
bwoodard sent in
a mathematical argument for the electoral college written by
MIT Prof, Alan Natapof. Hopefully we'll have more word later today. Update: 11/09 01:55 PM EDT by C :For those of you interested in seeing why there is such controversy over the Palm Beach County ballot, you can take a look at the ballot to see for yourself if it might be a bit unintuitive. If you'd like more food for thought, you can check out this article which talks a bit about the usability issues behind the ballot's design.
The grounds for contesting an election under this section are:
(a) Misconduct, fraud, or corruption on the part of any election official or any member of the canvassing board sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
(b) Ineligibility of the successful candidate for the nomination or office in dispute.
(c) Receipt of a number of illegal votes or rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.
Found at The Florida Election Commission. (sorry, a direct link is impossible)
The fundamental legal question is "was the will of the people thwarted?" And there is little doubt that it was in this case.
I don't need large brains to have a good time.
Does anyone else find it incredibly ironic that
the brothers Daley would be on national media crying about election irregularities? Just for the record, their father stole the 1960 presidential election for Kennedy away from Nixon.
So long and thanks for all the fish . . . !!!
This is why math professors should stick to math. (Note that I'm a math major, so perhaps I should as well. ;)
Not that the longwinded article linked here actually got around to talking about Natapof's "proof" in any detail, but from what I could piece together, all he proved is that under an electoral college system, each voter has a greater chance of deciding the election with his or her vote than under a direct election.
Well no shit, Sherlock. That's why we're sitting here watching a recount come in dozens of votes at a time, arguing about a couple hundred blind old ladies, and fretting about whether more Floridians overseas are serving in the military or dual citizens of Israel. OF COURSE a smaller number of voters has a larger chance of deciding an election under the electoral college system.
In other words, the e.c. is considerably more unstable and capricious than a direct election. There is a much greater chance that the true will of the people will not be reflected in the final result. Why we need a mathematical proof to investigate this is not totally beyond me, because it's an interesting combinatorial result (I'd assume). Why this Natapof guy actually thinks this is a good thing, though, is utterly ridiculous.
His best argument (according to the article) is that we don't complain that the World Series is determined by who wins the most games, not who scores the most runs. Putting aside the fact that the two situations are *not* analogous (for one thing, the fact that there is a different starting pitcher for any given 4-5 games in a row is the most important argument for why we need a best-of-7 Series), the point here is that the World Series is put on for the purposes of *entertainment*, not of deciding who rules the free world. Not that I'm not having a lot of fun with these election results (side note--I helped elect a corpse! Whaddya think of that!), but there's an argument to be made that instability and lack-of-representation in results, while good for sporting events, are actually *bad* for presidential elections.
Furthermore, he shows absolutely no understanding of the greater "rules" of the electoral college "game". For example, the electoral college has, throughout the course of US history, served to prolong and promote slavery and remove incentives for granting female sufferage or encouraging higher voter turnouts. For some excellent explanation why, why don't we read a *relevant* article by someone who's actually qualified to talk about the electoral college, Akhil Reed Amar (Yale professor and one of the foremost academic experts on Constitutional law).
According to Florida's own documents (PDF, sorry) there were only 337 voters registered in Palm Beach County as Reform Party members, as of October 10 of this year.
3400 votes for Buchanan is directly in line with every other Florida county that has a similar number of registered Reform Party members.
What other Florida county? No other Florida county had even 1/3 as many votes for Buchanan.
The real voting irregularity here is the moderators who voted for these lies as "informative".
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
I've put together a page illustrating three alternate ways a person could cognitively process the Palm Beach ballot, all of which would give erroneous Gore votes to Buchanan.
It's just a first pass, but it should make my visual perception and cognitive neuroscience teachers happy.
Kevin Fox
Kevin Fox
the polls in western florida closed one hour later than the rest of FL. They are on central time....
> Any exit polls for that?
FWIW, exit polls are exactly why I think there really is something wrong in Florida.
Ignore the news reports and anecdotes; these could easily be shrugged off as reporters grasping for a scoop and the whingeing of sore losers.
But exit polls. The Voters News Service originally gave the state to AG on the basis of exit polls. They retracted after complaints from the Bush HQ, but that was well after the polls had closed, and the exit polls weren't changing anymore. Now the actual results do not reflect the exit polls that the original prediction was based on.
Think about it. Voter enters booth. Voter mistakenly votes for Buchanan. [Optional step: Voter recognizes mistake and re-punches for Gore.] Voter exits booth. Voter tells VNS surveyer that s/he voted for Gore. VNS tallies samples and predicts a win for Gore. Election workers tally votes, find a surprisingly high total for Buchanan and a startlingly high number of double-punched ballots in Palm Beach, and do not find a win for Gore.
The hypothesis leads to results that fit the observations exactly.
You still need to test the hypothesis, though. Have the 19,000 double-punched ballots been destroyed? If not, how many of them show a Gore-Buchanan combination? Any other suggestions for testing the hypothesis?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Hmmm. that sounds familiar... Haven't the Republicans been spending the last four years telling anyone and everyone that more people voted against Clinton than for him? At least he had a plurality of the popular vote. Dubya won't even have that.
We live in interesting times...
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
If Al Gore wins the recount, Florida's 25 electors should go to Gore, and Gore should become President.
If George Bush wins the recount, Florida's 25 electors should go to Bush, and Bush should become President.
What I'm seeing today - a bunch of Gore's lawyers looking to replace a bunch of unspoiled ballots validly marked for Buchanan because they believe those votes "should have been Gore's" - is terrifyingly close to a coup d'etat.
The Constitution does not give any party a "do over" because they don't like the results of an election.
I urge the electors of Florida to consider casting their votes according to the results of the mandatory recount, and to ignore the implications of any legal decision to throw out validly-marked ballots for any candidate.
(Note that spoiled ballots, such as those with two holes punched in them - are another matter entirely. I agree with the judge's decision to throw them out.)
I believe there is a legitimate concern with the controversy concerning the ballot in Palm Beach County. The ballots there were printed such that out of the three ballot punchholes next to the Democratic ticket section, the topmost represented a vote for Buchanan, and the second represented Gore. In spite of the arrow pointing to the correct hole for Gore, this confused many voters who asked poll workers which hole was the right one. The poll workers could not give a definite answer either way, and did not have any other authority to check with.
As a result, Buchanan had more votes in PBC (3407) than in any other county in Florida. This is strange because Gore carried Palm Beach county easily, 64%-36%. The next highest votes for Buchanan by county is Pinellas (1100), which also had the highest turnout for Nader, and was won by Gore, 52%-48%.
Just wait, I'll start heading toward my point now. Pinellas and Palm Beach represent the highest combined turnout of Nader/Buchanan voters by number, followed by Hillsborough (which neighbors Pinellas), Broward, Dade, Brevard, and Sarasota. These represent the highest population counties in Florida. Dade, Broward, Palm Beach, Pinellas, and Hillsborough had the top 5 voter turnout, respectively. In four of these counties, Buchanan voters represent .1-.25% of total votes, and ~10% of combined Nader/Buchanan voters. However, in PBC Buchanan gets .8% of the total vote, and raked in 38% of the combined, alternative vote.
This sticks out like a sore thumb, and I'm sure someone with a degree in statistics could prove my point. Why would PBC have SO MANY Buchanan voters if it is decidedly liberal? Why would it buck the trend set by counties of similar makeup and population? If one adjusts the Buchanan vote in PBC to correlate with the statewide average and the averages in other counties, One could assume that the total number of Gore votes miscast for Buchanan is ~2500.
I'm not saying that this is enough to win FL decisively for Gore, but if the final count and recount gives Bush the state with less than this margin, it will be a hotly contested point for years to come.
Addendum: I heard some republican flak on Crossfire claiming that Buchanan got 3000 votes in PBC in 1996 as well. If this were true, I would concede that the ballot confusion might not be the cause of these results. However, Buchanan wasn't ON the ballot in 1996. According to the FEC, Buchanan was not on the ballot in Florida, and must have got less overall than James Edward Harris's(?) 13 votes for president. According to this calendar from the 1996 election, he never specifically visited Palm Beach county in 1996. (He visited Ft. Lauderdale, Tampa, and Orlando in one trip.)
I've been googling steadily while writing this, and I can't find any further evidence of strong Pat Buchanan support in PBC, in 1996 or 2000. I am continuing statistical analysis on the county data as I type this. I want to look at the dramatic difference between PBC's Buchanan support and the rest of Florida, and see if any other states have counties which have this much of a flip flop.
The problem of applying mathematics to real world situations is how you define things. In particular, Natapof's seemingly counterintuitive assertion that the electoral college raises everyone's political power (in what otherwise would be a zero sum game) hinges on his peculiar definition of political power:
What is the probability that one person's vote will be able to turn a national election? The higher the probability, the more power each voter commands. To figure out these probabilities, Natapoff devised his own model of a national electorate--a more realistic model, he thought, than the ones the quoted experts were always using. Almost always, he found, individual voting power is higher when funneled through districts--such as states--than when pooled in one large, direct election. It is more likely, in other words, that your one vote will determine the outcome in your state and your state will then turn the outcome of the electoral college, than that your vote will turn the outcome of a direct national election. A voter therefore, Natapoff found, has more power under the current electoral system.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
if GWB upholds his principles, he looses the election, and thus deserves to win.
if GWB betrays his pricinples, he wins the election, and thus deserves to loose.
[as seen on a bulletin board in Fermi Lab]
"Never apply a Star Trek Solution to a Babylon 5 problem"
Looks like a Babylon 5 problem to me ....
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Shows a scatter graph of Buchanan votes vs. Bush votes, by county. Assuming that Buchanan should get a fairly consistent percentage of the Bush votes by county (and this graph does seem to bear out that assumption), the Palm Beach results stick out like a sore thumb.
It has also been reported that 19,000 ballots from palm beach were invalidated because 2 holes had been punched for the presidential candidate. I wonder which two they were...?
It's important to emphasize that this does NOT mean that there was any sort of fraud going on. It was most likely an honest mistake, the official who designed the ballot said she was trying to find a way to use large fonts to help the elderly voters.
If it's clear that they were confused, though, it seems that the only fair thing to do is have a re-vote in Palm Beach, open only to those who voted the first time. (They all signed their names, right?)
---
According to Orvetti, Buchanan(-hole) has just conceded that the 3400 votes are "properly Gore's".
OK. I still have a problem with it (in the Constitutional sense), but if Buchanan's willing to relinquish his claim on those votes, now I can see at least some argument that might persuade a judge to grant a revote.
In any case, the recount results are skewing heavily to Gore, so my whole point may be moot. Let's hope so.
Great tension
National focus
Reno offering to help if need be
One side cautionsly claiming victory
One side saying we must respect the law
Time dragging out and even Thursday's count may not be the final word, as abesentee ballots may play a factor
A possible court battle
People are already getting sick of it
When it's all over they'll probably mistakenly send a boy to Cuba.
--
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
A few tidbits I picked up this morning:
Palm Beach has 15,000 registered Reform Party members and Broward County has less than 200 registered Reform Party members.
3400 votes for Buchanan is directly in line with every other Florida county that has a similar number of registered Reform Party members.
Buchanan has a residence in Palm Beach as does a close relative. He received 8000 votes in he Republican primary in Florida.
There are more Reform Party registered voters in Palm Beach county measured as a percentage of total registrations than in any other county in Florida.
If the final outcome is that Bush retains the electoral college votes and Gore the popular, whoever ultimately takes the White House is going to have a rough time. The opposition is going to carp endlessly that he doesn't have a 'mandate' and that he's in office illegitimately. With the narrowest of margins in the congress, I see this as a recipe for gridock. Maybe this wouldn't be so bad. For us.
[Comic Store Owner]: Worst ballot ever !
"Sweet creeping zombie Jesus!"
-The Professor, Futurama
Then the local democratic elections administrator shouldn't have signed off on approving the ballot, which she did - thus officially endorsing the design on behalf of the Democrat party.
Come on...look at the ballot. It isn't confusing at all. Not at all. The only people who are responsible for the problem are the people who couldn't follow simple instructions and take the time to look at what they were doing.
> Unfair in the sense that 4 populous states (CA, FL, NY, and TX) can't impose their will on the rest of the country,
> yes. You have to have AT LEAST a dozen states to win under an electoral system, but under a popular system you can basically promise every federal dollar to those four states and the rest fo the country can go to hell...
This is quite like the situation in Canada. Ontario, the most populous province by far, essentially elects the prime minister. It's an ongoing sore point with the western provinces, particularly Alberta and British Columbia, and is one of the reasons why many in the west support the idea of a senate system as practised in the States.
That's right, it's not democratic. It's not supposed to be. We are not a democracy, we are a "republic".
Several times before the election I posted electoral collige links and facts, but it does not do any good for the vast majority of people. It is like trying to explain to them that "personal property" != "private property".
So many of these folks seem to be just simpletons following the words of the TV person with the "best" hair and the slickest teleprompter delivery.
Now, for the rest of us who know what the Electoral College is, I suggest that we get our States to adopt the Maine/Nebraska Electoral system and also to end the practice of "faithless electors" (as 25 or so States have done already).
If this system is adopted we still get to tell our State how to vote while having some diversity between congressional district (those of us with more than one house member at least). It even opens the possibility of other parties to gain electoral votes in the final tally and perhaps a little more national exposure.
Visit DC2600
Eve Fairbanks says I drive a hybrid!LOL
Oh boy....
... Now count down to the third Hole. It points to Al Gore! It looks as though Al Gore may have stolen votes from Harry Browne! This is so confusing!!!
This is really gonna throw a wrench in the election.
check out the Ballot and count down to the third Canidate (Harry Browne)
It seems obvious to me that Harry Browne should win the state of Florida.
Check out the CBS page for presidential election results in Florida, by county.
Now take a look at the votes for the Socialist Workers Candidate, Harris. Scroll down the page.
6 votes..
5 votes..
0 votes.. (what a loser)
88 votes.. (ok, I take that back)
0 votes..
36 votes..
Volusia County: 9,888 votes!!! That's 5% of the county residents, and 95% of Harris' total vote.
Same thing with Philips, the Constitution guy, who got 2,927 votes in Volusia, almost 3/4 of his total count for Florida. Hell, Browne, who only got 1% in other counties by generosity of rounding, beat out Nader in Volusia to get 3,211 votes. Is there some ultraeffective "pro third party, anti Green" ad campaign that decided to spam just one city in Florida?
Perhaps, but that's not enough for those wacky Volusers; apparantly they've been having some computer trouble, too. According to a section of this ABC News article, the vote count for Gore in Volusia may have decreased by about 10,000 votes while they were sending in returns Wednesday morning. WTF?
Yeah. So, I guess my point is that Florida sucks. I guess they weren't expecting to be swarmed over by national news coverage, though; this kind of stuff probably happens everywhere, but never takes on this kind of importance.
My credentials: MS in math, 4 years experience as a quality control statistician.
Here are some "flaws" in the analysis at http://web.mit.edu/norstadt/Public/election.pdf
1. The data at best supports the proposition that the Bush/Buchanan voting ratio for Palm Beach is significantly different than other Florida counties (but maybe not, see 5 below), but not that it is different from the "desired voting" ratio for Palm Beach.
2. Using Bush/Buchanan ratio is very weird - should use Buchanan/All ratio. Trying to introduce outside knowledge inherent in focusing on how "conservative" voters split introduces preconceptions that are non-statistical in nature. Why not Buchanan/Nader?
3. Normalization set chosen to be Florida. Why? Why not all US? Why not all of the South?
4. Expected distribution of Buchanan support rates by county is not known and cannot be determined by choosing a model. You must provide a non-statistical argument for why you believe the model holds.
5. In particular, even if the counties are normally distributed (doubtful), the maximum value should be chosen from an extreme value distribution, not a normal distribution. Extreme value distributions have very heavy tails. The fact that the choice of Palm Beach was made post hoc changes how the analysis should be done.
6. The basic premise is flawed because the vote rate might actually be from a different distribution than other counties. For example consider the distribution of voters born in Palm Beach. You cannot look at a model to infer that the emperical distribution is "wrong". In other words, maybe Palm Beach really does have more Buchanan supporters.
7. If the hypothesis is "the butterfly ballot causes confusion between candidate 2 and candidate 3", then it would be proper to test that hypothesis on ALL races using that ballot. In particular the Senate race on the same ballot did not display any anomoly despite having 3 candidates and comparable total votes.
I am not saying that the result is not anamolous, just that it is very easy to conclude that it is for the wrong reasons.
So you say. Expert testimony says otherwise. Jakob Nielsen:
Nielsen doesn't go so far as to say that this is specifcally what cost Gore the election, but with 19K incorrectly filled out ballots in two counties, I'd say it's a pretty fair guess.
Additionally, from Dan Bricklin:
Nineteen thousand. People with poor vision, people who received incorrect sample ballots. It's obvious that the statistical anomoly is there, especially when graphed. So rather than grousing about how dumb people are, why not design a ballot that doesn't skew the result?Funny, then, that it's not believable to Buchanan himself.
Never take moderation advice from sigs, including this one.
It's not reasonable. Period. Unless they show that there was willful misconduct and election fraud (which I've seen no evidence of there being), I can't see how they can allow them to vote again.
Imagine all of the Nader supporters going back to the polls... but THIS time, they know just how incredibly important their vote is for getting a liberal into the White House. I could all but guarantee you that the Nader vote shrinks to close to zero and those votes go to Gore. This would be true at the county level, state level, or national level.
-S
--- What parts of "shall make no law", "shall not be infringed", and "shall not be violated" don't you understand?
In any case, the recount results are skewing heavily to Gore, so my whole point may be moot. Let's hope so.
That's because the big counties -- which went heavily to Gore -- have already reported. For the most part, the counties remaining are smaller, rural counties which were won handily by Bush. See for yourself.
It's absolutely amazing that a something like this could affect the election. I hope that someone investigates this.
I'm tired of this Bullshit! Everyone's votes counts, and everyone should be allowed to vote. Just because someone doesn't meet your standard of intelligence doesn't mean they're not worthy of voting for the candidate of their choice.
Ranessin
Ehm yes...thank you, that made it even more clear to me that the Electoral College system is totally unfair, I would even go as far as saying that it's NOT democratic at all. People should choose the president, not states.
:)
That's right, it's not democratic. It's not supposed to be. We are not a democracy, we are a "republic". The rational behind the EC was to have the states elect the president, with the states using the popular vote to decide how they voted. This also prevented the "mob rule" problems inherent in true democratic governments.
I find it humerous that the democrats that were on TV last week expousing the virtues of an electorial college system (when it was assumed that Gore would win the EC, but lose the popular vote) are now calling for it's removal and complaining how unfair it is
Finkployd
I would caution, however, that I've not run a T test or a chi-squared test or any other measure to see if this is really an outlier. It looks like one to me. However, with so few data points, it is hard, statistically speaking, to know for sure if it is an outlier, or just an unlikely, but statitically insignficant event. Mean and standard deviation do not tell the whole store.
I know I have a bias here. My personal solution to all the problems would be to apportion the invalid votes. If there's a vote for Bush and Buchanan, each gets 1/2 a vote. Add up the numbers, round down to the nearest whole vote and you are golden.
I've also seen references to Florida law that specifically states that ballots have an "X" on the right side of the name of candidates only. Don't know how true that is, but that would make these ballots illegal. If they are illegal, then the courts would have to deside what the most appropriate legal remedy would be. I don't envy them that task.
It would also would like to see a statistical analysis of the delta in the votes as a percentage of voters done. It seems on its surface that the 700-odd votes that were missing in the original count seems high for a county the size of Palm Beach. Almost all the other country results seem to be about what I'd expect. But all the counties aren't in yet, so it is hard to know for sure.
I'd also compare this year's results with prior years that Buchanan ran to see if there are any statistical differences between the two.
There are Lies, Damn Lies and Statistics :-)
I don't see a problem if there was 100% voter turnout. Isn't that what this country is about?
I also have a big problem with people dismissing the elderly or anybody else that got confused. They aren't so feeble minded to not know how they wanted to vote. In an ideal world they would vote in a way that made it clear that were little or no room for errors. Having helped the elderly on many occasions, I know they need special attentions that younger folks don't need. On the other hand, younger folks tend to need other things the elderly don't so the accomidations made to the elderly aren't that special all things considered.
Another mathematical fact. Right now the electoral college gives smaller states more power because they have proportionally more votes than their large bretheren. If we subtract out this bias by subtracting 2*states one from each candidates total, one see that Gore wins with 220 votes (219 needed in this hypothetical situation).
Finally, damn this is a barn burner.
If the voters in Broward were confused, they would've been confused by the ballot we used up here in Duval as well (just look at the samples printed everywhere and remove the right hand page and it's exactly what we had in Duval).
In addition, I find it incredibly hard to believe that someone could go through that ballot, being confused and picking the wrong hole, then continuing on through the other 10 pages or so, and then, upon reaching the parking spot, having just voted for many candidates and issues, suddenly have the realization that they misunderstood the very first page and voted wrong. At least not in the numbers being anecdotally reported. While they may have voted wrong, I doubt they all realized it in the parking lot.
Point of fact - the alleged confusion is supposed to arise due to the placement of the Democrat and Reform party punches, not the Republican one (which was pretty clearly located first on the ballot). Since the ballots in question were used in the West Palm Beach area, it might be useful to check how the numbers broke down there. Acc ording to CNN:
Since the original margin between the Bush and Gore was only 1784 votes, I'd call that signifigant.
Additional evidence that the ballots may have caused widespread confusion, from the same article:
So, another comparison, this time of the two-selection error rate on two different parts of the ballot. More than 19,000 voters selected two presidential candidates, which is more than five times as many as made the same mistake for senators, and more than ten times as many as Bush's lead statewide.
Say what you want to about Daley, Jackson, Mfume, and whomever else you feel is a little too leftward leaning for your tastes. But the numbers do tell a story here.
1) When trashing media, consider that NPR was far more responsible in assigning states to candidates. Just trash the commercial media.
2) Why prosecute people that had difficulty with the ballot? I had to transcribe about 50 answers on my SAT when I discovered I had accidently skipped a bubble. There's no eraser in a 'punch'-type voting booth. Look for numbers of how many Palm Beech or Florida ballots were punched twice, and hence discarded. I think the number is around 19,000. Of course, they should have just asked for new ballots, but humans are humans.
2.5) Especially, why prosecute elderly people who had problems with the ballots? These people have seen more wars, recessions, and changes in their lifetimes than anyone 'smart' enough to write "First Post" on slashdot. The ability to mindlessly follow arbitrary directions (for instance, working with computers...) is a learned skill, not a sign of intelligence. Saving enough money over your lifetime to retire to a warm climate, OTOH, is probably a better sign of intelligence.
3) Majority Rules? Our entire system of government is built around thwarting "Majority Rules". Go read the Federalist Papers and Constitution for more insight into the subtle problems of democracy and majority tyranny.
Most of the Slashdot posters can't bother to RTFM when it comes to their own government.
-Paul Komarek
Ok, I can buy his argument that as the size of the group increases towards towards some asymptote we'll call "majority", the power of the individual vote should go down in some proportion so that the minority isn't swamped by the majority. The way this is done, I suppose, is to just give slightly proportionally less electoral votes to really really large states. But that's still at a macroscopic, very high-grain (or is it low-grain) level.
Even if he is theoretically correct, and that we could formulate the optimum "minority"/"majority" point (is it at 75%? 85%? 51%?), I think that in the current state of politics this wouldn't matter anyway. The whole presumption is that each voter is 1) trustworthy/caring, 2) informed. The percentage of people who actually fulfill both of these requirements may themselves a minority! The fact is, people aren't voting for politicians based on the facts, based on their records. Many people vote based on fuzzy things like "likability", and "appearance". They vote because the million dollar hype machines have stuck the right memes in their heads. They vote because Britney Spears told em to. And if you think this is a one-sided tirade against the "average American", I happen to believe that it is also largely the political parties' faults for playing right along - they're all too glad to lower the criteria for the election process to things they can win: convincing people win tons of commercials paid by PACs and soft money, going around repeating the same tired old scripts.
Now consider *that* case and the electoral college. The actual *merits* of the candidates matter much less than the money they can spend (funded by those interests who want to buy policy) to convince voters. So given an equal amount of vested interests (hey, many of these big corporations give money to *both* campaigns just to make sure that no matter who wins they get their agenda pushed), and consequently a pretty equal amount of hyping and advertising, you can imagine voter results to be much more uniform than you'd otherwise expect (*cough* win popular vote by a fraction of one percent *cough*).
So the choice is either 1) clean up the damn system so the above scenario doesn't happen, and the electoral college works correctly, or 2) reform or abolish electoral college. The ironic thing is, 1 cannot be accomplished *because* of the electoral college stemming any progressive change. So it may be that we have to reform or abolish the electoral college, so that we can actually have a chance to clean up politics, so that the system works as it was intended to in the first place!
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Look, the first problem is not with the pages alone. Its how the pages lined up with the holes. Check out the mock image I threw together. The black dots are where holes might have been if there was play in the ballot book. The light grey dots is where they should've been (and where the one news photo I've seen shows them).
The stories from people just don't match that perfectly aligned news photo. But if you consider that the holes could've been shifted (really, the book would've been what shifted, but for all intensive purposes...) you can see how it could be confusing. One lady said she saw a dot RIGHT NEXT to the word Democratic, not the separating line above -- that turned out to be the Buchanan hole.
But there is another problem people have cited. If you go in there thinking only of two candidates, Bush and Gore, you look only for those two. In English, we read left->right, top->bottom, left_page->right_page. You could easily say "First one is Bush, so that's teh first hole... Second one is Gore so that must be the second hole!". Why read further? Why examine the right page at all when your candidate isn't over there? Remember, your hindsight is 20/20, so don't be so quick to label these people as "stupid" or you might be so yourself!
The fact is, the ballot was redsigned on to two pages so they could use bigger fonts to make it easier to read. That was a nice idea. But, they never evaluated what the other ramifications were.
Furthermore, the sample ballots sent out to the voters, etc. were paper books! There were no holes in there, no gap, etc. It was not what the ballot actually was. No one could've guessed.
1) Print out the alleged bad ballot.
2) Now place it horizontally about chest to collarbone level and at half an arms length away.
The arrows seem a lot closer together!
If it is like my poll the holes are physically under the ballot book by nearly the distance the holes are separated from each other. This means that unless you can look at it from above, which is not possible if you are short and the ballot and book are in fixed positions, again like at my poll, then the arrow appears to point between two holes.
In other paper ballot elections I attended, the ballots and books were designed so that unneeded holes were covered and there was never any doubt which holes to punch.
The palm beach ballot design my seem ok at first glance, but in use it would be quite ambiguous. This also explains why it was initially approved by the dems.
My ballot had similar problems but only on pages that were for the reelection of judges. Some other issues had several places between them. I noticed when i got to the right half of the page and the punch was already punched. This is a bigger problem for me since i am short.
--- If you don't want to know the answer, don't ask the question.
that made it even more clear to me that the Electoral College system is totally unfair
Unfair in the sense that 4 populous states (CA, FL, NY, and TX) can't impose their will on the rest of the country, yes. You have to have AT LEAST a dozen states to win under an electoral system, but under a popular system you can basically promise every federal dollar to those four states and the rest fo the country can go to hell...
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
I'm tired of this Bullshit! Everyone's votes counts, and everyone should be allowed to vote. Just because someone doesn't meet your standard of intelligence doesn't mean they're not worthy of voting for the candidate of their choice.
True, but you must have the basic motor coordination and reasoning skills to physically cast your vote. If you cannot communicate your choice on a simple ballot that 99.999% of the population either understands, or has the forsight to ask for help before randomly punching holes, than that is YOUR problem.
Maybe next time we should have computer monitors with great big colored buttons and a windows-style "are you really sure yes/no" dialogue boxes for the voters in palm beach.
Finkployd
Here's a plot of the distribution of votes in the relevant Florida precincts.
THIS ELECTION MUST BE RESOLVED WITH A TAG TEAM STEEL CAGE MATCHUP OF TITANIC PROPORTIONS!
Gore vs. Bush in a steel cage. Cheney and Lieberman waiting for the tag. Both houses of Congress on the sidelines threatening to turn the match into a full-on bicameral brawl!
There has never an opportunity like this before, and there probably won't be one again.
What are you waiting for?
Bruce
Bruce
You are the real Bruce Perens.
I just love how the people figure out they voted for the wrong person afterwards as though some great epiphany comes with lights from heaven and angels singing.
It was "figured out" by the rep for the district who said something along the lines of "There's no way that many people here voted for Buchanan, something must be wrong". Even though a similar amoung of votes for the Reform party came from there last election...
I HAVE seen the pictures of the Florida ballots. Come on, if someone can't figure that out, they really shouldn't be voting. In fact, they'd probably struggle with the games here: http://weazel.iwarp.com/games.html
In the Republican primary in that exact same area, thanks to support from a relative, Buchanan got up to 8,000 votes in 1996. In a primary, where a very small number of republicans actually turn out compared to election days. Of course, that was way before he left the party, but it is more than reasonable that he still has between 1/3rd of the supporters that he did back then. Saying "this is wrong because every other country voted differently." is complete bull. And, as most of us who's visited know, you never visit Palm Beach without seeing something odd. Anyway....
I would like to remind everyone that the electoral college works. Just because New York and California really really want Gore to win doesn't mean that the rest of the country wants what Gore represents. Imagine if the EU existed during Hitler's rise to power, and Nazi Germany dominated the popular vote for the elections to president of the EU. This is all hypothetical, but I'm simply afraid that a lot of people don't understand the power balancing that the electoral college brings.
The method by which the House would select the president is that each state would get a vote, not each representative. Take for example Texas... although heavily republican, 18 of the 30 districts in Texas elected a democrat -- meaning Texas would actually vote for Gore in the House. I don't have time to break down every state but I think it'd be a pretty close margin and not necessarily in favor of Bush.
but when you figure Gore has the majority vote and Bush has the electoral you have to wonder what this country is going
Actually, a large reason for the existance of the electoral college is to give smaller states a louder voice. The ~300,000 votes in North Dakota pale in comparison to the 6 million we're arguing about in Florida. If we go purely popular vote, the urban areas then dictate what happens to the rest of the country( we actually have this same problem here in NY with NYC dominating the entire rest of the state in state elections ).
Finally I think the press rigged this for the ratings.
We definitely agree there. The media stands to gain a lot of money in advertising revenue by making the election draw out as long as possible. The whole purpose of the Voters News Service, which is made up of the major news networks, is to help them "guide" their coverage. I don't see why we can't just wait 12 hours and wake up to see who won the election (of course, that means less ratings and thus less money for the tv news companies) rather than calling states before their polls close or influence the western states by calling the major eastern states early.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
-pf
PS -- Not to mention we have another month and change before the electoral college vote; if Bush ends up with 271 of the electorals, no telling what could happen there.
Make affiliate bucks
Most of the Democrats who were in favor of the electoral system last week are still in favor of it (for example, this guy named Gore who you may have heard of -- still in favor of the electoral college, as well as all his publicly speaking advisors).
---------------------------------------------
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
http://www.howstuffworks.com/ ele ctoral-college.htm
--
Wooden armaments to battle your imaginary foes!
But one thing that's been absent in news of this is an analysis of how many papers spoilt in a similar way Palm Beach County would normally expect, given the demographics.
Does anyone know what the deal is there?
For more news on this, check out The Palm Beach Post.
--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Ok, what have we learned from Campaign 2000 - First, the media is irresponsible. The early projection of Florida was idiocy at its finest. This election was and is still too close to call, yet the media egos want to be the first one to call the winner, as if anyone cares who called it first. I think the media needs to examine the use of exit polls, and also needs to get back to reporting raw numbers.
So what you're saying is that the media called "First post!" and then got moderated down?
See the ballot for yourself here.
Radio commentators are claiming that the number of Buchannan votes in the county in question are in the same proportion to the number of registered Reform Party members in the county as in other large Florida counties with significant amounts of Reform Party membership. A neighborhood full of Buchannan voters in a retirement community would hardly be surprising.
Norstadt's graph doesn't show the proportion of Reform Party registrants. So it is useless in distinguishing between the hypotheses (Democrat confusion vs. a concentration of either Reform Party voters or Buchannan supporters.)
More interesting might be a scatter-plot of Buchannan votes/Reform registration vs Gore votes/Democrat registration in counties with non-trivial Buchannan vote counts.
Such a graph would be so much MORE informative than Buchannan/Bush ratio that it raises the question of whether Norstadt chose that ratio because makes a good-looking graph for the Gore camp's "confused seniors" argument.
(Note, if you try to check this stat, that the Reform Party is called the "Independent Party" in Florida.)
(And no, I haven't researched this myself.)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Think of it as a UI design problem.
I had a similar problem with a UI a did for a Palm Pilot application that had to do with spacing of labels in closely spaced checkboxes (you don't have lots of room on a pilot). The users complained that it caused lots of problems, even though if you looked carefully at it, it was clear which checkbox belonged to each label and the users worked with the application every single day.
Naturally, I had to change it and split the form across multiple pages.
It's also important to note that many voters who made a mistake were forced to submit their ballot once punched. The poll workers did not allow them to destroy their ballot and get a new one.
So, you have a bad user interface that gives you one chance to get it right.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
What's slightly more disturbing is that the article goes on to say:
Is it just me, or does anybody else see this as a significant problem? Especially with the outcome of this election hinging on Florida's vote.Anyways... The ballots in Miami-Dade county should stand by law because all challenges to the ballot format must be made before the first vote is cast and ALL voters and campaigns in that county received an instructional copy of the ballot weeks before the election. That leaves outright fraud( forged absentee ballots, dead people voting, etc ) and the suppression of republican voters in the west(due to the early miscall of Florida going to Gore) as the most likely challenges.
I think a court ABSOLUTELY must not allow a revote. It would be unfair for one county or one state to have the power to elect the president knowing the status of the rest of the vote before walking into the booth. It also wouldn't be fair for a court to statistically modify the vote of Miami-Dade county based on demographic or other information as the votes were cast and if people were truly unsure of their vote, they could have asked for help from the officials at the polling center.
If there isn't a decisive winner, I think the ONLY fair thing to do, and this may rise to the level of a decision by the Supreme Court, would be to throw out the ENTIRE 25 electoral votes in Florida as if they had gone to a different candidate. Because neither man received a majority of the electoral votes(270), the Constitution says it is up to the newly elected House of Representatives to select the President. It seems the only way to ensure the rule of law is obeyed.
Don't leave your mind so open that your brain falls out. Don't close it so much that you cut off the blood.
Even if you have different candidates on it for senate/house/initiatives/whatever else, it should not be that difficult to define a certain format. I think it has a significant impact for a example in which order the candidates are presented, how easy it is to tell where to make your cross/punch a hole even if you are old and far-sighted.
What I'm trying to say, have the same layout everywhere, the same mechanism for voting, and no-one is going to complain afterwards because 100s of lawyers would look at it before. As I understand it at the moment every county has its own ballot paper (is that right?). Is there any good reason for that???
People have said that the actual ballots and the sample ones were "different", but I've seen pictures of both, and I don't see the difference. Maybe one of the pictures was faked up?
:)
A friend of mine has a sample ballot that was faked to him, and he has a "real" ballot. The only difference is that the sample ballot does not have the holes in it; the placement of names and arrows is the same.
He tried his kids (8, 10) on the sample ballot. He gave them 20 seconds to indicate "how do you vote for Gore". Then he asked them "how do you vote for Buchannan", and at this point, the 8-year-old had to ask how you spell Buchannan. Both were able to pick the right dot.
If that's "too confusing", we have more serious problems than who gets elected.
Or maybe they were just the same, and people are scrabbling to find explanations.
Mistakes were made. Both parties approved them in advance. We don't overturn elections over stupid mistakes, *even* if we think they might have changed the outcome. We certainly can't give one county the option of *CHANGING* their votes based on new information - but there's no way to prevent a do-over from being a *change* in the vote. At that point, it's unfair to the *other* 100,000,000 voters that none of *US* are allowed to reconsider our votes based on what we know of nationwide turnout.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
CmdrTaco, on behalf of all writers, English teachers, linguists, crossword puzzle solvers and spelling bee champions, I would just like to say: "We love you!"
Got Rhinos?
Those who did not vote have no right to complain about the outcome
Wow. First off, who are you to say that my right of freedom is speech is dependent on my responsibility to vote? I did jury duty this year -- can I at least moan a little? If people were confused by the ballots, then the ballots are confusing. I can see the mistake... second person listed, second hole. It is a dumb design. A lot of us may have the ability to figure it out, but the right to vote isn't dependent on your ability to figure out the layout of the ballot. NPR had an interview with a young lady that accidentally marked the wrong candidate (Patty-Patty Buke Buke), realized it, went out and asked for another ballot, and was denied -- nice. Anyhow...
First off, the registered voters all saw the ballot in advance, and none of them complained *then*.
Secondly, I think we should consider the implications of allowing a re-vote in this one county. These people would be voting, not based on what option they chose on election day, but based on the knowledge that the entire election outcome depends on them. I bet you'd get a lot more republicans coming out to vote. Some Nader supporters might switch.
However, this *isn't fair*. You aren't allowed to wait until you know what other people in your area do, *then* vote. If they get to re-do this, the only fair thing is for *everyone* to re-do this. In which case, several *other* states will probably flip-flop, one way or another, as apathetic voters who thought the state was a wrap-up for their side run out and make sure it is this time.
Yes, it sucks if people were confused. The time to bring that up was when people in *BOTH* major parties *REVIEWED* these ballots, quite some time ago.
In the mean time, whatever the recount says, it's better if we accept it and move on, than if we spend the next four years throwing accusations around.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/