Date: Thu, 16 Nov 2000 12:29:36 -0600 From: Gregg Geist Subject: Re: Fwd: what do you make of this? (fwd) At 02:18 AM 11/16/00 -0500, Robert Link wrote: >crt- > >I've expanded my response to this to include a few of my politically >active fiends because I'm curious as to what they think about it. > >Oh, and incidentally, the correct answer to "What do you make of >this?" is always, "Well, I can make a hat, or a brooch, or a >pterodactyl," followed by screechy pterodactyl noises. That's really funny. For those of you who don't know me, I am the science and math channel content manager for Apple Learning Interchange. I have a B.S. in astronomy and physics, about 40 graduuate hours in just about everything, and I have been to the Soviet Union twice. We don't have election trouble in this country. This unfortunately does not mean that we do not have weird elections. To me, the whole thing about missing votes is staggering. I just can't imagine that that many people can screw up their ballots. Now, as badly as the report at http://www.netrinsics.com/Duval/Duval.html is presented, I can't tell for sure if 15% of the votes were really invalid or not. If so, it's a huge problem and whichever counties are affected by this need to spend some time and effort figuring out how to fix it. One thing is certain: the punch card is not a thing to be used by inexpert people, and this is a known fact. There are reasons why optical scanners and bubble sheets are used in grade school: first, results are eradicable, so if the student goofs, he can fix it; second, if there is a machine failure, it's relatively easy for a human to look at the card and figure out which bubble the student intended to mark. We use bubble sheets in Travis County, Texas. It would be interesting to see what the failure rate is here. There is no chad in Austin. Sometimes I think that if a state cannot produce a margin of victory greater than their error bars, their electoral college votes should simply not be counted. That would make them clean up their act. Now for Duval county. First, I always told my students that if they gave me a graph without both axes labelled, I would hand it back. This is because I was told when i was in fourth grade that a graph was a representation of a relationship between two things and if I don't say what they are, my graph is meaningless. Well, I don't have enough patience or luck to think the same way as the presenter of those graphs, so I stopped trying to figure it out. Therefore I looked at the data. He're a representative sample. It's no wonder he complains about it being non-spreadsheet friendly. 1TREE PRESERVATION 2YES 2NO 301 000733000499000336000105 301A001357000968000652000236 301B001867001351000952000298 301C001903001451001016000348 301D001167000902000619000201 301E000782000551000381000129 301F001182000843000577000206 301G001971001374000973000284 301H002458001859001350000396 301J001080000605000404000134 301K001465001070000705000251 301L000928000717000519000146 So I looked at the .csv spreadsheet file. It's much nicer. It also does not have a column for flawed votes or discounted ballots. Looking at the text (on the web page) there is a preponderence of words like "undervoted" or "missing votes". Therefore I opened up the spreadsheet and created a column in which I calculated the total number of votes cast minus the sum of all votes for president, in order to see if the problem was too many votes cast or two few. In every precinct, that number was positive, meaning that more people voted than voted for president; or, put in more conventional terms, some people who voted left the presidential vote blank (which, given the campaign, is perfectly reasonable to me). As far as I can tell, it is this number that is being correlated with others on the web page, so therefore he seems to be saying that in counties where more people voted for Gore, more people didn't vote for any presidential candidate. So I created another column, "gore-bush", and plotted that vs. the missing votes, and got a vaguely bi-linear, highly scattered graph. By "bi linear, I mean that the points tended to scatter up in the highly Bush side and in the highly Gore side, which I think probably only means that in those precincts, lots of people voted (creating a high potential for differences between the candidates) and therefore there was a proportionately higher number of people who ignored the presidential race. If you want the Excel document, I can send it. Btw, it's very hard to figure out how to label graphs in Excel. Maybe this is why so many people publish unlabelled graphs now. I've tried several other ways of looking at number voted vs. candidates and I keep getting the obvious result: the more people that voted, the more that voted for gore in some places and for bush in others. The most populated precincts tend to be Gore, which doesn't surprise me. As I said, I can't figure out what the author of the web page is doing with his numbers, so I can't say for sure, but it sounds like he's picked up a tendency for largely gore counties to have more people who left the presidential part of the ballot blank. It says nothing about misvoting or any other kind of irregularity. It may say that more Democrats are apathetic about this election. Then again, I already knew that. That's one of the reasons so many voted for Nader. >>>The bottom line (quoted): >>> >>> These charts clearly illustrate a strong correlation between >>> Democratic precincts and missing votes for a presidential ticket. >>> Almost all precincts with more than 50% Al Gore votes have more than >>> 15% missing presidential votes. Almost all precincts with more than >>> 50% George Bush votes have less than 15% missing presidential votes. People in Bush areas really wanted Bush. And to quote Ralph Nader "Only Al Gore can beat Al Gore." His areas were more apathetic. >>>Interestingly, there were more valid votes for Senator than for >>>President in all precincts, implying voter confusion across the board, >>>but again, the discrepancy was far higher in predominantly Democratic >>>precincts. They weren't voting for either Gore or Bush, so the choice was easier. Sorry, guys, but I don't think there is anything really interesting in that data. >"The most dangerous of all falsehoods is a slightly distorted truth" > --G. C. Lichtenberg >"The plural of `anecdote' is not `data'." > --Unknown Statistics never lie, but statisticians are sometimes confused, and tobacco company executives lie about everything. >It could be that a large number of voters in Jacksonville >had no strong preference between Bush and Gore, and chose to >abstain by invalidating that part of their ballots. And, finally, it could be >a statistical fluke. So, my guess is that it is a base rate problem: an uninteresting corrrelation caused by the tendency to be more signal of a particular type where there happens to be more total signal of all types. But all they have to do is not vote in order to generate the numbers given. My guess is that actually invalid ballots are not involved at all in the numbers given on the web page. >We all have >heard the expression "Correlation does not imply causation," but that >expression has an ugly step-sibling that does not often get talked >about, "Correlation does not imply significance." There are 67 >counties in Florida alone, and probably a few thousand in the nation >as a whole. The results in any one county make sense only in the >context of similar results from the rest of the counties. Yetp. In this case the correlation is not significant because it derives from facts about voting, not about Duval county. It may just be that Jacksonvillains, for >reasons known only to themselves, simply vote differently than normal >human beings, in which case the only valid comparison population is >Jacksonvillains themselves. Jacksonvillains! What a cool word. I wonder if they use that for themselves. Unfortunately, I think that Jacksonvillainy is a national problem that tends to go under the alias "Voter Apathy". If those were democrats that didn't vote in those precincts, they can't complain about george Bush for the next four years, because they had the ballot in front of them, and didn't suck it in and vote for the lesser evil, like they should have. >it's not something >you just knock off in your spare time during the week following the >election, Oh damn. I think I just did. >Make no >mistake, most of the people pushing these analysis have a favorite >side in this contest, and that subtly colors their judgment, particularly >now, while the results of the contest are still in doubt. For about ten years now I have been saying that the difference between Republicans and Democrats is this: Democrats have good ideas but don't know the world really works, and republicans know how the world really works but don't have good ideas. That's not the only thing I say about democrats and republicans, by the way. >We can but hope that somewhere out there is a real statesman or >stateswoman that is drawing inspiration from the nation's polarization >to provide us with the leadership that is so egregiously lacking in >contemporary politics. AMEN! >The only >way to have a fair process is to spell out the rules before any votes >are cast, and limit the decision making after the vote to strictly >objective criteria, such as "Is the margin of victory below some >threshold," and the like. The precedents we set here will guide the >resolution of future disputes, and I fear we are making a muddle of it. I've been thinking the same thing. Moreover, I am astonished that this has not already been done. At the same time, I'm not as worried about it having long term bad effects. In the world before television and radio, this kind of muddle was the rule. >I also fear for the Electoral College. Already the demagogues are >beating the drums about the possibility of the electoral vote going >opposite the popular vote. This kind of thing has happenned every year, and this particular thing has happenned several times, in a United States with less states necessary to pass an amendment, and the Electoral College has survived. >Worse, there are whispers of pressuring >the electors to defect on their votes if the electoral vote is close. I >think the system can survive the demagogues, but a defection that >changes the result of the election will probably spell the death knell for >the Electoral College. I don't think so. I think that is exactly the kind of thing that would make people say "Well, maybe it's not such a bad thing, after all." Remember, one of the reasons the E.C. was created was so that there would be a time between the popular vote and the E.C. vote so the electors could say "are we sure we want to do this?" In reality, it would depend on why the critical defections took place, and how they came out in the long run. The electors are not required to vote for any particular person, and state laws saying that they are required to do so live in that virtual Supreme Court backwater of issues that they haven't killed yet because there is no reason to. Apparently, one of the Dukakis electors from 1988 cast his ballot for Lloyd Bentson as President. If they all vote Charles Twardy for president, it is perfectly legal, and whether the E.C. suffers will depend on how good a job Charles does by the time the amendment is actually voted. If anybody has any good ideas about how to make this happen, please tell me. Gregg squawk! Squawksquawk! [pterodactyl noise]