Kevin Elliott wrote:
At 12:38 +0000 11/10/00, Ken Brown wrote:
But are there no rules in Florida allowing for a re-vote? If there really are 19,000 spoiled papers from once county, that sounds "massive" to me. It may not be fraud - the fools who designed the papers probably thought they were doing right - but it has the same effect.
This is why people who don't know statistics should not be allowed to think... By no means is that number, by itself, of any significance whatsoever.
It is if I have a vague idea how big a county is. If a state the size of Florida has 60-ish counties I would be surprised if many of them had populations much over about million or less than 100,000 if the counties were reasonably randomly populated (if there has been an attempt to equalise the populations then even more so) Also, from years of political hackery & hanging around in elections, I know that over here spoiled votes are rarely as much as 1% of the total. So we have 3 possibilities - Palm Beach County is unusually large, Floridan voters are stupider than voters in London, or something went unusually wrong in that county. Assuming the county is the one described at http://www.co.palm-beach.fl.us then it is quite large. You'd have to compare it to other counties to see if it was worse.
How many got canceled last election- one number I heard said 14,000. If so then 19,000 is about what one would expect considering increased voter turnout and normal statistical fluctuations.
Still could be a sign that something is badly wrong. Just because the last election was a shambles there as well doesn't meant that this one should have been. If there is a problem it ought to be fixed.
More importantly, the ballot was approved by both parties before the election took place. If they didn't bitch then they don't have the right to bitch now.
Just goes to show that officials of more than one political party can be stupid (does that surprise you?) The citizens of Palm Beach (or wherever) have, under you constitution & the laws of Florida a right to vote in fair elections. (Over here in Britain we always sort of assume that US elections are corrupt anyway, especially in the South :-) Obviously, the only reason this is being talked about at all by anyone more than thirty miles from Lake Okechobee is because of the close-run Presidential election. That is what brought the (possibly) messy state of the election in Florida to light. Some Floridans wanted recounts, or possibly even recounts. The chances are they wouldn't have bothered if it hadn't been for the presidential problem. Are you saying that they mustn't use their rights under local, Floridan, law because it delays the appointment of the electoral college and further confuses the presidential race? That local law and due process be suspended for the convenience of the Federal system? Ken