From: Jeff Bone (jbone@jump.net)
Date: Tue Nov 28 2000 - 12:44:05 PST
Lisa Dusseault wrote:
> A sensible idea from the perspective of math/statistics but perhaps not from
> the POV of actually running an election...
Oh, wait, wow, here's a radical idea: why don't we just elect the president
*directly?* In fact, why don't we do it *online,* and if you don't have
connectivity we'll still have polling areas set up with net boxes to use? Voter
registration etc. and authentication could work just exactly like it does with
absentee ballots currently, votes are recorded / counted *instantly,* and we
know who the president is *same day.*
Nah, makes too much sense.
jb
>
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: Rahul Dave [mailto:rahul@reno.cis.upenn.edu]
> > Subject: Re: gore's speech
> >
> > In the future there ought to be a pre-decided percent difference, based on
> > measuring equipment, and mock-election experiments to say that an election
> > in county X is a tie if the difference is within N votes.
> >
> > And by some weighted process this needs to be extended to the
> > state as thats what really matters.
> >
> > If there is a tie a state ought to be dropped or the electoral college
> > votes split, with additional going to the marginal
> > winner(13-bush, 12 gore)
> > That sounds fair but
> > Uh-oh I just killed the constitution.
> >
>
> Not really, the constitution only says that the states decide how to
> allocate votes. If FLA decided to allocate votes as you suggest, this would
> be perfectly constitutional, AFAIK.
>
> But I fear this would cause twice as many "close races". Let's say the
> margin of error is defined to be 2%, for each candidate. That is, for any
> candidate, their votes might be overcounted or undercounted by up to 2%.
> Any difference up to 4% between the votes for the top two candidates would
> fall in this margin. So if A got 47.9% and B got 44.1%, your formula would
> call that a "tie", but I'm sure A would argue for a recount so that A would
> get all the votes instead of just half. Or if A got 48.5% and B got 43.5%,
> B would certainly argue for a recount in order to get at least half the
> votes instead of none. The same thing would happen if A and B were
> reversed. We'd still get political wrangling for recounts, just more often
> and for lower stakes.
>
> lisa
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