Ugh! in Minnesota
Dec. 4th, 2008 12:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aFor several years now, people have loudly (and I think, largely incorrectly) whined and bitched about electronic voting. They've decried the lack of a paper trail (though it would be easy to legislate a doubly-redundant one) and they've got out the tin-foil hats to talk about voting machines changing the results.
At the same time, they continue to ignore a larger problem that electronic voting machines somewhat resolve: the unreliability of paper vote counting.
If there's anything that Florida in 2000 and Minnesota in 2008 should have taught us, it's that there's a margin of error in vote counting, just like there is in polling. It's a small area in which you can't accurately determine the will of the people due to any number of human errors introduced either by voters or poll workers.
The infamous butterfly ballot of Florida 2000 probably cost Gore the election as much as the Supreme Court overstepping their role, and stopping votes from being counted. As a result, I think it's pretty easy to say that the 2000 Presidential election fell into the voting margin of error. Even aside from that, all the counting and recounting and the changing numbers as that occurred should have pretty clearly showed the margin of error.
And I have no doubt that the same is true in Minnesota. They've been counting and challenging votes for almost a month there now, and it's pretty impossible to say who's winning. The Franken camp currently puts their lead at 10 or 20 votes, which appears to involve dismissing some or all of the challenges (some or all of which will doubtless be challenged, since the Coleman camp has challenged, for example, votes for Franken where the voter also voted for McCain, claiming that a McCain vote showed the "intent" to vote for Coleman).
But today appears to be the cherry on Minnesota's crap cake. A Minneapolis precinct has lost 133 votes. And, it was a heavily Democratic precinct, thus those 133 votes translated to 46 net for Franken.
You watch, the final Minnesota numbers will be within 46 votes.
At the same time, they continue to ignore a larger problem that electronic voting machines somewhat resolve: the unreliability of paper vote counting.
If there's anything that Florida in 2000 and Minnesota in 2008 should have taught us, it's that there's a margin of error in vote counting, just like there is in polling. It's a small area in which you can't accurately determine the will of the people due to any number of human errors introduced either by voters or poll workers.
The infamous butterfly ballot of Florida 2000 probably cost Gore the election as much as the Supreme Court overstepping their role, and stopping votes from being counted. As a result, I think it's pretty easy to say that the 2000 Presidential election fell into the voting margin of error. Even aside from that, all the counting and recounting and the changing numbers as that occurred should have pretty clearly showed the margin of error.
And I have no doubt that the same is true in Minnesota. They've been counting and challenging votes for almost a month there now, and it's pretty impossible to say who's winning. The Franken camp currently puts their lead at 10 or 20 votes, which appears to involve dismissing some or all of the challenges (some or all of which will doubtless be challenged, since the Coleman camp has challenged, for example, votes for Franken where the voter also voted for McCain, claiming that a McCain vote showed the "intent" to vote for Coleman).
But today appears to be the cherry on Minnesota's crap cake. A Minneapolis precinct has lost 133 votes. And, it was a heavily Democratic precinct, thus those 133 votes translated to 46 net for Franken.
You watch, the final Minnesota numbers will be within 46 votes.