Reply #64: in good faith

[OnTheOtherHand]

Thank you for a thoughtful post.

I accept that you believe that some attacks were denigrating. I could lead you through past posts and point you to some attacks that I think are much more denigrating than anything said about autorank. My point isn't to keep score -- I don't keep score. It's just a matter of diverging perceptions.

It's an open secret about me that I tend to take it personally when smart women are ignored. It has to do with my mother's life story. So when I learned that autorank had talked with Ellen Theisen before running the Scoop story, and ran it (apparently unchanged) anyway despite her warnings, I was shocked. Really. What's the point of having colleagues?

Nowhere in all those attacks was listed the simple truth. The BoE had placed numbers in their official results page that were wrong, and those numbers had been there for a month!

Well, I direct you to WYVBC's post of Tuesday, January 16:

The county is reporting incorrect turnout figures on the website, a fact that can be easily seen by examining the precinct data. available from the County website. Go here and select the second link from the top on the left side. http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/enrs/main_primary.asp?ED=11xx07xx2006&EL=GENERAL&YR=2006&CR=A

You will see that the numbers of "ballots cast" are grouped together for vote-by-mail precincts, curbside "precincts", and provisional ballot "precincts". These groups of ballots cast are then attributed to every contest -- even when they don't apply, so that the total ballots cast is too high for every contest.

If the Mecklenburg precinct details are correct, the problem is that the county officials have reported inaccurate numbers on the website, not that the undervote is excessive.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=203&topic_id=464643&mesg_id=464724 (emphasis in original)

I thought that was pretty clear! (Actually, the precinct results are the top link on the left side, but they're clearly labeled.)

You can back up to her original thread on this subject, here. The OP is a model of civility, as far as I can see. Check out her post #7 there: "The Scoop story has Mecklenburg's undervote in double-digits, maybe the author didnt realize that all county absentee voters are lumped together in the turnout figures for each of the three CDs." I went over similar ground repeatedly. (For instance, on Thursday the 18th: "The main problem was the inclusion of all absentee, curbside, and provisional ballots in the turnout figures for all three House districts in Mecklenburg. Even though most of the district was in NC-12, all the NC-12 (and NC-09) absentee etc. ballots were included in the NC-08 turnout.")

I'm not going to draw any morals. I'm just referring you back to some things that you may have missed at the time because they didn't fit into your perception of what was happening.