Math Forum Discussions

Victor Steinbok

Posts: 858
Registered: 12/3/04

Re: Count all the votes
Posted: Nov 15, 2000 1:29 AM

Plain Text

<I have deleted all but Greg Goodknight and Gerald Von Korff email
addresses from the CC list>

Greg wrote:

> How many times should each vote be counted? Every Florida precinct has had
> at least two full counts; some have already been counted four times.

Curiously, each time the stack was recounted, new votes were discovered.
Apparently some of these ballots have NOT been counted four times,
otherwise the count would not have changed.

> How has it been proven that the hand count is more accurate than the machine
> count when the vote is contained on a paper punch card with no particular
> features?

Having witnessed Greg Goodknight shill out propaganda of his own, why am
not surprised to find him swallowing the Republican Party absurd
propaganda? The idiocy of this question and its underlying assumption
can be demonstrated very easily: remember Minnesota? remember New York?
remember Indiana? remember Scotland? I am sure there were many more
machine counting fiascoes (Harcourt paid back California how many
millions of dollars for their testing errors?), but these four in
particular stand out as monuments to the dangers of standardized testing
and machine tabulations of scores. It is ironic that there is a link
between Bush's stance on standardized testing and his stance on the vote
recount (neither one is really Bush, but who is counting?!)

Greg, don't forget that the machines are designed by humans, programmed
by humans and tuned and cleaned by humans. If errors are made along the
way in machine design and maintenance, the result is an error of far
greater proportion than anything a single manual counter can create.
Besides, what would the "Founding Fathers" say? Did THEY have computers
to tabulate their votes? (BTW, New Hampshire counts ALL its votes by
hand and it has done so for the past century.)

VS-)