IP: Re: Counting away (after a while)

[Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>]

>Date: Wed, 13 Dec 2000 12:12:30 -0800
>From: Brad Templeton <brad@templetons.com>
>To: Dave Farber <farber@cis.upenn.edu>
>
>
>
>Those counts will be interesting for historians, but I wonder what
>good will come of them?  If they show for Gore, or if some counts
>show for Gore and some for Bush, the market-destroying fight will
>resume, with calls for Bush to resign (that he won't heed, or will at
>least fight as hard as Gore fought this battle) and a real crisis.
>
>On the net, where I feel I should be surrounded by people with
>scientific training, why do I feel alone in saying that this election
>was a tie?
>
>My mathematical training says that when two results are equal to
>within the accuracy of the measuring device, they are to be viewed
>as equal.  It's a tie.  You don't strain the measuring system past
>its limits to look for the "real winner."  There is no real winner.
>
>In fact, I find it amusing to think that the discipline of working
>with approximate results is also sometimes known as "fuzzy math."
>
>The system has no way to deal with a tie, which is a shame.  So I am
>not surprised at the non-scientists attempting to eke a "true" winner
>from the results.  But the rest of us should know better.
>
>We should also know that the error is not simply one in the mechanical
>measuring devices.  We're uncovering a new type of error which we might
>call "political error."   That's the error bounds which arise from arguing
>over definitions, and doing it in courts.   In any given election, it's
>clear that the final totals can be manipulated, within certain bounds,
>through the application of legal and definitional arguments.  All elections,
>looked at this closely, are full of irregularities.  Some are physical
>like how hard a hole is punched or whether a checkbox got outside the
>bounds.   Some are procedural like whether ballots conform to the law.
>Some are ethical like whether the wrong people had access to ballot
>applications.
>
>We didn't even see all the issues in this one, partly
>because you'll never see all of them, and in part because some of them
>were not politically appropriate to push.  (ie. Gore couldn't support the
>Seminole suit or others like it, and Bush couldn't push other things
>once they took their 'accept the first count' stance.)
>
>The political and procedural margin of error is very large in some countries,
>and it is smaller in the USA but not non-zero.
>
>So our fuzzy math tells us the result in Florida (and indeed the USA) was
>a tie, the difference being within our margin of error.  Bush beat Gore
>in the same sense that sqrt(2) * sqrt(2) is less than 2 on my calculator.
>
>Flipping a coin would have been as much of a result as the processed we
>just witnessed.



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