Slashdot Mirror
WA Governor Recount Ends With 42-Vote Difference
Republican Dino Rossi came out on top of the gubernatorial recount in Washington state, beating Democrat Christine Gregoire by 42 votes. He had won the initial count by 261 votes. King County (where Seattle is) gave Gregoire a 245-vote swing. It's expected that the Democrats will call for a partial hand recount, which they would have to pay for (25 cents per vote), unless they end up winning the recount.
Rossi is pro-life.
I don't care what you are. "Pro-life" and "pro-choice" commonly refer to beliefs about abortion. Whatever you want those words to "really" mean is irrelevant, and saying Rossi -- also Catholic -- is not pro-life based on your unclarified redefinition is stupid.
Your ideas behind those redefinitions are stupid too -- if Bill Gates gave away all he had upon becoming a millionaire, he never would have been able to become a billionaire, and give away the *billions* he has donated to charity -- but that's beside my point, which is that saying Rossi is not pro-life based on your own pet definition is not conducive to reasonable communication.
How so? I give as much as I possibly can to Fr. Taft- and his homes for unwed mothers.
No, you do not. Sell your computer and give the money to charity, and then we can start talking.
I was actually thinking that such a number ... should have consequences for the Governor's term in office
So, you're saying you don't like democracy.
The initial spread of 261 was greater than 150, which would have required a manual recount. Yet on the machine recount, the spread dropped to less than this threshold. If such happens, they should really require a manual recount anyway.
You miss the point of the recount. It's assumed that a machine recount will still be accurate, if the initial spread is greater than 150, unless it overturns the result, in which case they WILL have more recounts.
If you want to be curt, that is fine. I was actually saying that this debacle of a virtually non-existant spread
If you want to be deceptive, that's not fine. There's nothing non-existent about it, virtually or otherwise.
is indicative of how we really don't have a strong opinion for either party
You say that as though it is in any way meaningful. All that matters is who wins: that person is the governor, period, with all the rights and powers and obligations that entails.
if you think that the margin of voter error is larger than the marger of victory then no, you can't say that the choice scientifically reflects the will of the people (or even of the voting people).
You have it backward. As long as one candidate has more votes, no matter if it is 1 or 1 million, that candidate represents the democratic will of the people, period. That's a fact, definitionally. Unless you dislike with democracy, of course, which you already said you do, so why I am bothering?
Your attacks are pathetic. Your blind faith in vote counting is pathetic. Your ad hominem attacks are pathetic. You saying that people don't understand statistics because they don't agree with you is pathetic.
I have 2 pens and a pencil on my desk. Every time I count them, I get 2 pens and 1 pencil. It doesn't make sense to try to find any statistical error in this count.
NowI pick up a ruler and put it against the pencil. I record the number of ticks I count on the ruler (this count is, of course, speeded by the way the ruler marks off groups of mm ticks in cms, etc.). My count of ticks will not be the same if I remeasure after I stop typing this message. The count wouldn't be the same if I called my office-mate over to perform the meaurement. It is too hard to measure--Our eyes can't easily resolve ticks. Our hands can't hold the ruler perfectly parallel to the pencil, nor hold the 0 marker to the tip. Perhaps the eraser or the tip get worn down slightly between measurements. If accuracy is important, it makes sense to measure many times so that you can establish a mean and a standard deviation. A lack of precision in measuing can have substantial impact on our final result. Our precision would be much worse if we had fewer ticks further apart & had to extrapolate more. One individual measurement is less likely to be the "true" measure of the pencil than the mean is.
Counting votes should be like counting the pens and pencils, but is like measuring the pencil. It is hard. Each recount gets a different number. It makes perfect sense to apply error analysis to voting. Though we aren't intentionally making a random statistical sample of votes, we are aware of error.
If you disagree & think that counting votes is like counting pencils and pens, please tell me why there are differences between the counts!!!
. Every time I count
> You're an idiot.
You're a troll.
If the vote can be trusted completely, there would never be a need for a recount.
... only you avoiding the legitimate and logical question of what if the outcomes change due to these errors.
That makes no sense. A recount is part of the process to make sure you count it as accurately as possible.
Mistakes are real & few deny that.
Duh.
I see
Yes, you do see things that don't exist; I am well are of this.
They are a more reasonable guess of the order of magnitude for some sources of error.
So before you stated as fact, now you concede you were wrong. It's a start.
I've said we aren't trying to extrapolate anything from random sampling. But statistics is a broad field and isn't useful for only random samplings. If you make multiple measurements & they differ, you can reconcile those differences using statistics.
No, you don't. You reconcile them by counting again.
We still have to care about that statistical error.
There is none.
Offer an explanation for why each and every vote migh be different between two counts
Very few votes were different between the two counts. Why do you think all of them were different? That's ridiculous!
and say why they intentionally didn't count correctly the first time through.
Someone INTENTIONALLY didn't count correctly? Where's your evidence of this?
The will of the people as to who their leader should be is how the people actually voted.
Which is determined according to the legal process previously agreed upon by the people.
No, those laws dont fundamentally change how they tried to vote.
How people "try" to vote is irrelevant, if they don't do so according to the law.
There is evidence that the margin of victory is less thanthe margin of error.
Get it through your thick skull: there is no margin of error. That concept has nothing to do with actual counting of votes.
You seem to throw up strawmen
No, I responded to what you actually wrote.
& assume I mis-state current laws.
I never said anything of the sort. I said you didn't understand the law, not that you misstated it. I don't recall you stating any law, so it would be odd for me to think you misstated when you didn't even attempt to state.
But you did say the law assumes there is no error, which is clearly false: if it did, it would have no provision for recounts. Duh.
Ah. So you are now willing to admit that the law doesn't account for statistical errors
I never said otherwise. Please stop lying. I said the law does not assume there is no error. I did not say it "accounts" for "statistical error." There is no statistical error in counting votes, as anyone who isn't you knows. There clearly is error, and the law recognizes this, and does what it can to account for it.
The sorts of things that should have been done right the first time around. The sort of things that would mkae a third count different from either of the first two.
Actually, no, some of those things should NOT have been done the first time around, because ballots came in after the count had been completed (Reed wants to change the law so this is less likely to happen in the future).
But yes -- duh -- you don't want there to be problems, and we should strive to get it right the first time. No kidding.
But if a third count was able to overturn the election, most of your argument is burned to the ground
Uh, no. None of my argument is harmed in the slightest bit. You clearly have no clue what my view is. That's pretty damned pathetic.
For whatever reason, the first counts got it wrong. If the third count hadn't been conducted, the wrong guy would be in office.
No. The
It's because of comments like this that American democracy is held in such low regard outside of the US.
Saying Apple is better than MS is like saying Botulism is better than rabies.
Looks like we've got more than 150,000 valid equal rights claims in Ohio, based on the evidence that voting queue length correlates to historical precinct support. I wonder whether any nonlocal Democrat lawyer wants to be destracted by Washington. However, based on the clear evidence emerging from Florida, I would not advise any Democrat with the ability to pay for a recount to give up anywhere.