There are two issues, in scientific study, the scientist must recognize that every instrument has minute biases based on the way it was made and that consistent bias may taint results. Vote counting machines are no different.
So given that the change in the vote between the original count and the recount is 5924% of the new margin of victory, it may be worthwhile to use a different system to make sure any systemic unreliability or bias is removed.
Of course the fact that the total change was more than 60 times the current margin of victory conceals the fact that if you were to enumerate the individual changes to each county, you'd end up with an even larger swing.
Ignoring a systemic bias, we've only reduced the chance that those results are incorrect to 25%. We can see that the margin of victory is less than the error margin on the machines.
I know several people have claimed that hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts. I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that if hand recounts were necessarily less accurate, then you would not mandate their use in the closest races.
Of course, the main advantage of a hand recount is that you have observers from all parties confirming the count, thus once it's done, you can't ask for another one, you've already confirmed that this one is correct.
Except, at one point in your life, you were a fetilized egg. "Were" is the past tense of "to be". A fertilized egg is, by definition, a "human being" because contains the entire existence of a human. A skin cell or cancer cell is not a human being because it never represented the entire totality of a human.
Actually, everyone was also at one point an unfertilized egg and a sperm cell. Should we consider all sperm and all unfertilized eggs to be people too?
Actually a skin cell or potentially a cancer cell* could represent the entire totality of a human. Either could probably be used as the basis of a clone.
* The genetic material in the cancer cell might be damaged though, I'm not sure about that.
Hmm. I wonder if this is a reflection on the American educational system. In most countries, three people counting one hundred ballots can come up with an accurate count.
I guess this is only a problem in countries that are S-M-R-T.
If you're thinking "But there are more than 100 ballots!", add "Repeat as Necessary" to above instructions.
Um, according to the numbers I've seen Tom Daschle won his senate seat in 1998 with 62% of the vote count. I doubt that's 500 votes, you might be thinking of the 2002 Senate race in which the Republican Candidate claimed that fraud had taken place, but wouldn't be proven by a recount, and thus declined to ask for one.
In the Kenney/Nixon election, there actually were lawsuits over alleged illegal practices, those lawsuits were lost, though some Republicans claim it was because of politically motivated judicial bias.
I'm not sure how the wife replacing the husband could itself be illegal unless the proper procedures for replacing a candidate weren't followed.
Why do I keep feeling like I'm seeing the Chewbacca defense over and over?
I'm not going to deal with your countless questions because most of them seem to be desperate cluthing for any reason to disregard the studies result.
There is no proof of fraud here, merely the notice that the vote counts in electronic voting counties show a disproportionate increase in Bush's vote count. The state election commissioner decided to purchase machines with no paper trail, leading inexorably to this conclusion.
Add the exit polls, the Diebold scanner discrepencies, the blackboxvoting.org report of fradulent activity, and the numerous acts to disenfranchise voters before the vote (for example,: redirecting democratic voters to noexistent polling stations, spreading roofing nails on their driveways), and you have an election that reeks.
Not quite true, exit polls are one of, if not the, primary methods of verifying election results in UN monitored elections, they are usually very accurate, for instance the percentages were spot on in the majority of states in the U.S. with only a handful of states being off by 1% or more, and as I understand it, in all of those states the exit polls favoured Kerry. That's is a statistical abnormality, not impossible but highly unlikely. If the polls are inaccurate they should represent errors on both sides of the actual vote.
It's possible that there was systemic bias in the polls, but I would like to see proof that the bias is in the polls and not the election results. It should be important enough to investigate.
Blackboxvoting.org says otherwise, and their most recent posting shows that there seems to be deliberate voter fraud going on. You don't refuse to show citizens the signed copies of the vote tallies and then try to give them ones that are unsigned that have different totals, and dump the original copies into the trash all by accident.
There's also this report and the report that shows a significant and consistent difference in voting patterns in counties using Diebold electronic scanning machines. That's three different sources confirming that something is wrong based on three different investigative measures. How different ways does someone have to show that the totals don't add up?
In most cases they don't. Stealing the paper ballots becomes a real chore when you have to replace and destroy (literal) tons of paper without alerting any honest individuals to your activities. It's much easier to replace a dozen memory cards you can put in one pocket than half a million paper ballots.
Well, usually, the paper ballot are supposed to be dropped into a collection device, like a voting box, so that if someone questions the legitimacy of the results, they can be counted and verified against the machine totals.
The idea is that a) you can verify the unchangable piece of paper registers your vote, and b) you give that to the election officials so that they can check against the computer totals.
Ideally, random audits will also be performed across the state to determine to catch any systemic differences between paper trail and electronic results.
That last part is why the voting machine companies don't want the paper trail, because they'll be under pressure to fix problems, which costs them money.
I'm just pointing out errors in your arguments. I didn't say "even Warren Buffet", that was someone else.
Just because you think the hypothetical "left" would hypothetically critize something, doesn't mean that anyone with sense would. There are nut cases across the spectrum.
"The truely rich folk in America (like Theresa Heintz-Kerry, for example) don't have "income." They have wealth. Top-bracket income taxes hit a few CEOs, but also nail almost every farmer and small business owner."
For example, I don't think you're right here. Those with "Wealth" use it to create more wealth, most of the time that counts as income. Except under the rules that Bush has proposed where capital gains and divdends will face much lower or nonexistent tax levels. Also, according to the actual figures, a maximum of 500,000 out of 32 million or about 3% of business owners qualify for the top tax bracket. That's because it applies to S-Corporations and unincomporated business owners only and they can deduct expenses from their income before figuring taxes on it. It could be as low as 90,000 out of 32 million business owners, because those specific figures are not made public. Even Bush only claimed it was 900,000 out of 32 million business owners.
Your wealth tax idea is amusing, it would likely provoke a mass defection of the richest people out of the U.S. rather than actually gathering any new taxes.
Yes, some people would look at it as a give-away to the rich, particularly if you run a budget deficit while doing so. However, there is also a big difference when your tax cuts deliberately target the top income bracket for relief. If you reduce only the highest income bracket, you aren't cutting everyone's taxes, merely those in that bracket.
Nice to get, but it's not going to change my life. A tax break for the mega-sized corporation which I work for is a huge bonanza for me and all of my coworkers, espcially since we are also share-holders.
No, I think not. In equivalent tax relief you are better off with the $300 rebate. The only way you can expect to get more from an equivalently sized rebate to corporation is if you expect to profit disproportionately from that rebate, or you expect your company's stock price to rise dramatically. Neither seems terribly likely. You are also, of course discounting the cumulative economic impact of many people with their extra $300, which should benefit your company anyway. What you are preaching is essential corporatism, that the corporation knows how to spend money better than you. It's fundamentally the same as socialism, that the government knows how to spend money better than the individual.
"It wasn't an attack on Buffett."
I'm afraid it was, you discount his opinion on financial matters because of his political views. That's the very essence of an ad hominem.
I don't know where you got Alan Greenspan crediting the current recovery to tax cuts, but it seems like a dramatic oversimplification of his recent comments on the state of the American economy. The best I could find was a comment that he preferred lower income taxes, which is not a surprising statement from a conervative Republican. In fact, he did criticize the government for running a deficit.
1) Bull. Tax rebates as a percentage of income is a deliberately obfuscatory tactic. It was possible to give everyone who pays taxes an equal reduction in their taxes which would have spurred spending, especially since the poor and middle class are facing a declining real income because of rising insurance costs.
2) Bull. The middle class is helped more by tax breaks for the middle class.
Also, it doesn't matter what you think a tax break for the poor will be spent on, the fact that they get to spend it on what they want is what makes capitalism work, and that spending makes more money for the capitalists who run the businesses they patronize.
3) Your "ad hominem" attack on Buffett might matter if he was arguing about Bush's personal hygiene, however, Buffett's long term success as a financial manager qualifies him as a expert on financial matters. Even partisans who disagree with you on the merits of Bush can be correct about fiscal policy. You can't continually claim all Democrats are liers and wrong about everything without the refrain sounding tired and worn out pretty quickly. Try proving the argument wrong instead of attacking the expert's politics.
Hmm. I was under the impression that the voting machine had two metal bars that obscured the arrows during the actual voting process, but I may be mistaken.
every system has its problems, differences in how votes are counted, error rates, etc. I find it amusing that in 2000 the SCOTUS stopped the recount because different systems in different counties for doing recounts meant that ballots were not bein gcounted in a univorm manner... so they tossed it on equal protection grounds."
I find this even more amusing because it ignores the fact that different systems were used to count the ballots in the first place. If it fails equal protection then by simple logic so does the entire election.
I think you misrepresent the issue, some people couldn't handle "I punch the hole on the next line down from the one I want to vote for". If I want to vote for candidate 2, I punch hole 3.
That's because independent analysis has indicated that American elections are among the world's most poorly guarded against fraud since the 1960's. And nothing has been done to improve the situation since then.
You don't hear about fraud in Canadian elections because there's not enough to make a story out of. We require identification with place of residence to vote in our elections. That prevents Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck from voting.
"That the press and most (maybe) of the electorate falls for this is the main reason why so many on the left are willing to believe the election was rigged."
No it's a matter of subjective validation (only noticing what reinforces your current viewpoint), selective thinking (only accepting evidence that matches your current viewpoint) and communal reinforcement (grouping yourself only with people who agree with you).
It's very easy to get wildly inaccurate world views through the combination of these three processes. Of course, conservatives are no less affected by these forces, and social conservatives are especially vulnerable to them, as they have a tendency to try to isolate themselves from "corrupting influences".
Ok, I understand now. The Navy decided what the banner would say, and the White House approved the message, knew what it said, deliberately hung it before the press conference conference in a location where it would be visible and then proceeded to make a speech which contained precisely the same message as the banner, and therefore should be immune to criticism on underestimating the amount of opposition to the American occupation of Iraq.
Um. The RIAA is claiming a sharp decline in revenue. Of course if you check the RIAA flagship companies you'll notice... record profit levels. The decline in RIAA sales is a result of a decline in CDs produced by the RIAA.
So the situation for the MPAA and the RIAA isn't all that different.
You say that as if you think "the system" is going to care that you're not participating.
There's only 5 ways to change the system: 1) Voting 2) Running for office 3) Legal challenges 4) Public service (working for the government) 5) Organized violence
If you're not going to do the first, what are you going to do instead?
If you don't want to vote for either of the two major party candidates, instead of not voting why don't you cast your vote for somone else? Then you'll have a right to complain, if you don't vote, then you haven't got any right to complain about the current situation because you're part of the problem.
If you decide not to vote, then you deserve whatever you get as a result.
I call poetic justice on that. You build your system on a platform you know or should know is insecure, people get to gloat when that decision comes back to bite you.
Mind you, apparently there are already plenty of Bank Terminals that use Windows out there, so it's not particularly interesting news.
I think it would be more effective to remove Microsoft sites from the index or penalize them heavily. So that when you search for Microsoft, you see the anti-Microsoft pages first. If you just lock them out of the search engine many will either not switch or become angry with Google.
However, they could put a note on google that only displays to IE users that tells them their browser is broken and browsing the internet could damage their computer unless they replace it with a browser that works. That would be amusing, especially combined with a sudden drop in Microsoft PageRank rating.
I suspect this is one of the reasons Microsoft is trying to create their own super search engine. They don't like someone else having that kind of power over, especially when they use Linux.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two issues, in scientific study, the scientist must recognize that every instrument has minute biases based on the way it was made and that consistent bias may taint results. Vote counting machines are no different.
So given that the change in the vote between the original count and the recount is 5924% of the new margin of victory, it may be worthwhile to use a different system to make sure any systemic unreliability or bias is removed.
Of course the fact that the total change was more than 60 times the current margin of victory conceals the fact that if you were to enumerate the individual changes to each county, you'd end up with an even larger swing.
Ignoring a systemic bias, we've only reduced the chance that those results are incorrect to 25%. We can see that the margin of victory is less than the error margin on the machines.
I know several people have claimed that hand recounts are less accurate than machine recounts. I'm not sure about that. It seems to me that if hand recounts were necessarily less accurate, then you would not mandate their use in the closest races.
Of course, the main advantage of a hand recount is that you have observers from all parties confirming the count, thus once it's done, you can't ask for another one, you've already confirmed that this one is correct.
Except, at one point in your life, you were a fetilized egg. "Were" is the past tense of "to be". A fertilized egg is, by definition, a "human being" because contains the entire existence of a human. A skin cell or cancer cell is not a human being because it never represented the entire totality of a human.
Actually, everyone was also at one point an unfertilized egg and a sperm cell. Should we consider all sperm and all unfertilized eggs to be people too?
Actually a skin cell or potentially a cancer cell* could represent the entire totality of a human. Either could probably be used as the basis of a clone.
* The genetic material in the cancer cell might be damaged though, I'm not sure about that.
Hmm. I wonder if this is a reflection on the American educational system. In most countries, three people counting one hundred ballots can come up with an accurate count.
I guess this is only a problem in countries that are S-M-R-T.
If you're thinking "But there are more than 100 ballots!", add "Repeat as Necessary" to above instructions.
Um, according to the numbers I've seen Tom Daschle won his senate seat in 1998 with 62% of the vote count. I doubt that's 500 votes, you might be thinking of the 2002 Senate race in which the Republican Candidate claimed that fraud had taken place, but wouldn't be proven by a recount, and thus declined to ask for one.
In the Kenney/Nixon election, there actually were lawsuits over alleged illegal practices, those lawsuits were lost, though some Republicans claim it was because of politically motivated judicial bias.
I'm not sure how the wife replacing the husband could itself be illegal unless the proper procedures for replacing a candidate weren't followed.
Why do I keep feeling like I'm seeing the Chewbacca defense over and over?
I'm not going to deal with your countless questions because most of them seem to be desperate cluthing for any reason to disregard the studies result.
There is no proof of fraud here, merely the notice that the vote counts in electronic voting counties show a disproportionate increase in Bush's vote count. The state election commissioner decided to purchase machines with no paper trail, leading inexorably to this conclusion.
Add the exit polls, the Diebold scanner discrepencies, the blackboxvoting.org report of fradulent activity, and the numerous acts to disenfranchise voters before the vote (for example,: redirecting democratic voters to noexistent polling stations, spreading roofing nails on their driveways), and you have an election that reeks.
Not quite true, exit polls are one of, if not the, primary methods of verifying election results in UN monitored elections, they are usually very accurate, for instance the percentages were spot on in the majority of states in the U.S. with only a handful of states being off by 1% or more, and as I understand it, in all of those states the exit polls favoured Kerry. That's is a statistical abnormality, not impossible but highly unlikely. If the polls are inaccurate they should represent errors on both sides of the actual vote.
It's possible that there was systemic bias in the polls, but I would like to see proof that the bias is in the polls and not the election results. It should be important enough to investigate.
Blackboxvoting.org says otherwise, and their most recent posting shows that there seems to be deliberate voter fraud going on. You don't refuse to show citizens the signed copies of the vote tallies and then try to give them ones that are unsigned that have different totals, and dump the original copies into the trash all by accident.
There's also this report and the report that shows a significant and consistent difference in voting patterns in counties using Diebold electronic scanning machines. That's three different sources confirming that something is wrong based on three different investigative measures. How different ways does someone have to show that the totals don't add up?
In most cases they don't. Stealing the paper ballots becomes a real chore when you have to replace and destroy (literal) tons of paper without alerting any honest individuals to your activities. It's much easier to replace a dozen memory cards you can put in one pocket than half a million paper ballots.
Well, usually, the paper ballot are supposed to be dropped into a collection device, like a voting box, so that if someone questions the legitimacy of the results, they can be counted and verified against the machine totals.
The idea is that a) you can verify the unchangable piece of paper registers your vote, and b) you give that to the election officials so that they can check against the computer totals.
Ideally, random audits will also be performed across the state to determine to catch any systemic differences between paper trail and electronic results.
That last part is why the voting machine companies don't want the paper trail, because they'll be under pressure to fix problems, which costs them money.
I'm just pointing out errors in your arguments. I didn't say "even Warren Buffet", that was someone else.
Just because you think the hypothetical "left" would hypothetically critize something, doesn't mean that anyone with sense would. There are nut cases across the spectrum.
"The truely rich folk in America (like Theresa Heintz-Kerry, for example) don't have "income." They have wealth. Top-bracket income taxes hit a few CEOs, but also nail almost every farmer and small business owner."
For example, I don't think you're right here. Those with "Wealth" use it to create more wealth, most of the time that counts as income. Except under the rules that Bush has proposed where capital gains and divdends will face much lower or nonexistent tax levels. Also, according to the actual figures, a maximum of 500,000 out of 32 million or about 3% of business owners qualify for the top tax bracket. That's because it applies to S-Corporations and unincomporated business owners only and they can deduct expenses from their income before figuring taxes on it. It could be as low as 90,000 out of 32 million business owners, because those specific figures are not made public. Even Bush only claimed it was 900,000 out of 32 million business owners.
Your wealth tax idea is amusing, it would likely provoke a mass defection of the richest people out of the U.S. rather than actually gathering any new taxes.
The people who voted for Bush, naturally. Obviously, you need to lower your standards more.
Yes, some people would look at it as a give-away to the rich, particularly if you run a budget deficit while doing so. However, there is also a big difference when your tax cuts deliberately target the top income bracket for relief. If you reduce only the highest income bracket, you aren't cutting everyone's taxes, merely those in that bracket.
Nice to get, but it's not going to change my life. A tax break for the mega-sized corporation which I work for is a huge bonanza for me and all of my coworkers, espcially since we are also share-holders.
No, I think not. In equivalent tax relief you are better off with the $300 rebate. The only way you can expect to get more from an equivalently sized rebate to corporation is if you expect to profit disproportionately from that rebate, or you expect your company's stock price to rise dramatically. Neither seems terribly likely. You are also, of course discounting the cumulative economic impact of many people with their extra $300, which should benefit your company anyway. What you are preaching is essential corporatism, that the corporation knows how to spend money better than you. It's fundamentally the same as socialism, that the government knows how to spend money better than the individual.
"It wasn't an attack on Buffett."
I'm afraid it was, you discount his opinion on financial matters because of his political views. That's the very essence of an ad hominem.
I don't know where you got Alan Greenspan crediting the current recovery to tax cuts, but it seems like a dramatic oversimplification of his recent comments on the state of the American economy. The best I could find was a comment that he preferred lower income taxes, which is not a surprising statement from a conervative Republican. In fact, he did criticize the government for running a deficit.
1) Bull. Tax rebates as a percentage of income is a deliberately obfuscatory tactic. It was possible to give everyone who pays taxes an equal reduction in their taxes which would have spurred spending, especially since the poor and middle class are facing a declining real income because of rising insurance costs.
2) Bull. The middle class is helped more by tax breaks for the middle class.
Also, it doesn't matter what you think a tax break for the poor will be spent on, the fact that they get to spend it on what they want is what makes capitalism work, and that spending makes more money for the capitalists who run the businesses they patronize.
3) Your "ad hominem" attack on Buffett might matter if he was arguing about Bush's personal hygiene, however, Buffett's long term success as a financial manager qualifies him as a expert on financial matters. Even partisans who disagree with you on the merits of Bush can be correct about fiscal policy. You can't continually claim all Democrats are liers and wrong about everything without the refrain sounding tired and worn out pretty quickly. Try proving the argument wrong instead of attacking the expert's politics.
Hmm. I was under the impression that the voting machine had two metal bars that obscured the arrows during the actual voting process, but I may be mistaken.
"1. There are no standards
every system has its problems, differences in how votes are counted, error rates, etc. I find it amusing that in 2000 the SCOTUS stopped the recount because different systems in different counties for doing recounts meant that ballots were not bein gcounted in a univorm manner... so they tossed it on equal protection grounds."
I find this even more amusing because it ignores the fact that different systems were used to count the ballots in the first place. If it fails equal protection then by simple logic so does the entire election.
I think you misrepresent the issue, some people couldn't handle "I punch the hole on the next line down from the one I want to vote for". If I want to vote for candidate 2, I punch hole 3.
We don't allow butterfly ballots.
That's because independent analysis has indicated that American elections are among the world's most poorly guarded against fraud since the 1960's. And nothing has been done to improve the situation since then.
You don't hear about fraud in Canadian elections because there's not enough to make a story out of. We require identification with place of residence to vote in our elections. That prevents Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck from voting.
"That the press and most (maybe) of the electorate falls for this is the main reason why so many on the left are willing to believe the election was rigged."
No it's a matter of subjective validation (only noticing what reinforces your current viewpoint), selective thinking (only accepting evidence that matches your current viewpoint) and communal reinforcement (grouping yourself only with people who agree with you).
It's very easy to get wildly inaccurate world views through the combination of these three processes. Of course, conservatives are no less affected by these forces, and social conservatives are especially vulnerable to them, as they have a tendency to try to isolate themselves from "corrupting influences".
Ok, I understand now. The Navy decided what the banner would say, and the White House approved the message, knew what it said, deliberately hung it before the press conference conference in a location where it would be visible and then proceeded to make a speech which contained precisely the same message as the banner, and therefore should be immune to criticism on underestimating the amount of opposition to the American occupation of Iraq.
Um. The RIAA is claiming a sharp decline in revenue. Of course if you check the RIAA flagship companies you'll notice... record profit levels. The decline in RIAA sales is a result of a decline in CDs produced by the RIAA.
So the situation for the MPAA and the RIAA isn't all that different.
I hope you get a lot of comfort from being able to say "I didn't try".
You say that as if you think "the system" is going to care that you're not participating.
There's only 5 ways to change the system:
1) Voting
2) Running for office
3) Legal challenges
4) Public service (working for the government)
5) Organized violence
If you're not going to do the first, what are you going to do instead?
If you don't want to vote for either of the two major party candidates, instead of not voting why don't you cast your vote for somone else? Then you'll have a right to complain, if you don't vote, then you haven't got any right to complain about the current situation because you're part of the problem.
If you decide not to vote, then you deserve whatever you get as a result.
I call poetic justice on that. You build your system on a platform you know or should know is insecure, people get to gloat when that decision comes back to bite you.
Mind you, apparently there are already plenty of Bank Terminals that use Windows out there, so it's not particularly interesting news.
I think it would be more effective to remove Microsoft sites from the index or penalize them heavily. So that when you search for Microsoft, you see the anti-Microsoft pages first. If you just lock them out of the search engine many will either not switch or become angry with Google.
However, they could put a note on google that only displays to IE users that tells them their browser is broken and browsing the internet could damage their computer unless they replace it with a browser that works. That would be amusing, especially combined with a sudden drop in Microsoft PageRank rating.
I suspect this is one of the reasons Microsoft is trying to create their own super search engine. They don't like someone else having that kind of power over, especially when they use Linux.