I love this stuff.
I love taking apart BAD arguments that are meant to mislead people.
Check these out by Josh Levin from the Slate:
“Cannon's analysis doesn't jibe with Slate's exit-poll numbers. A comparison to the latest vote tallies shows Slate's final exit numbers in the paper-trail states of New Hampshire (undervalued Bush by 5 percent) and Nevada (undervalued Bush by 3 percent) were less accurate than those in Ohio (2 percent off), Florida (3 percent), and New Mexico (2 percent). The other state Cannon lists, Illinois, won't require a paper trail until 2006.”
http://www.slate.com/Default.aspx?id=2109141_
- That Is a beautiful S.O.S. (Sleight of Script) whose affect is to (not) effectively dispute the major discrepancies between the Exit Polls and the actual vote.
It’s very clever actually, what he does is show state polling ‘margin for error’, not precinct polling. You see – statewide, his numbers are correct, but the entire state did not use electronic voting. PRECINCT numbers show a bald discrepancy wherever electronic voting was used.
Without getting into details – I’m sure a statistician or other non-rocket scientist would find interesting an E-voting machine employment per capita comparison between the very same states Levin compared in his article.
Here’s another nice try at obfuscation;
“The big problem with this theory is that this year's results match those from 2000. (And with the exception of Dixie, which used punch cards in 2000, all of these counties used optical-scan machines four years ago.) In 2000, Baker County had 83 percent registered Democrats, and 69 percent of the county's voters went for Bush. Dixie County had 86 percent registered Democrats, and 58 percent went for Bush. Franklin County: 81 percent registered Dems, 53 percent for Bush. Holmes County: 83 percent registered Dems, 68 percent for Bush.”
http://www.slate.com/id/2109416/Ok, ok… did anyone else get that? Levin says that the theory of election tampering should be thrown out based on the fact that… allow me to paraphrase, “Conditions were exactly the same then as they are now, except for the one county who still used punch cards back then and their results didn’t SKEW LIKE THE REST from the Exit polling data.”
Am I insane, or did he just make the case for getting rid of these things?
Can you believe people ACTUALLY fall for this?
Americans are SO mentally lazy!