[IP] More on Election and a general editorial comment

[Dave Farber <dave@farber.net>]

First an Iper sent me the following:

"How about Civil Discourse and sending out only
verified material for a change.  "

I am neither equiped with the resources to verify things or motivated to
only send out verified items. I select material to make one thing and
question. I held off for a while on sending many things waiting for
addirtional information but not always.

Just for the record, if the press had held off on Nixon till it was
"verified" we would have lost a major opportunity to show the limits of
poower.

Dave



------ Forwarded Message
From: Henry Minsky <hqm@ai.mit.edu>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:06:28 -0400
To: dave@farber.net
Subject: Re: [IP] How to Rig an American Election


These conspiracy theories about rigging of elections by tampering with the
voting machine
programming  are far-fetched and also completely miss the most alarming
lessons of
the last presidential election. I think that people and the media were not
sufficiently astonished
by the terribly close margins which the elections were won. People should
be asking how
is it that the votes are so very precisly close to 50% on each candidate or
issue. The
answer is that there is a frighteningly effective use of polling and other
techniques to carefully
quantify what people are planning to vote for which issues, and to apply
money in precise leverage
points to only bring in votes where they will swing an election.

There is nothing illegal or maybe even unethical about this, but it
basically says that the party or candidate with the most money will
generally win. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it strikes me as sad and
naive that this vote-machine tampering conspiracy meme is going around,
when the results are clearly explainable by the influence of
wealth and better polling technology on elections.





------ End of Forwarded Message

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