[Imc] Re: what academics do in their spare time.

[Milt Epstein]

On Thu, 9 Nov 2000, Sascha Meinrath wrote:

> howdy all,
> 
> for those who like statistics, and want a statistical answer to what
> is going on in palm beach, i encourage you to look at the following
> website:
> 
> http://madison.hss.cmu.edu/
[ ... ]

Is anyone (other than blinded Bush supporters) really questioning that
there was a problem here?  I think most have accepted that there was.
The real question seems to be, what can/should be done about it.  And
that's not that simple a question.  Because anything they might decide
to do there has repercussions for what they might have to consider
doing elsewhere -- for example, if they do some kind of re-vote,
should they do that everywhere the vote is close, or where people say
they were confused and/or mis-voted?  Should they do statistical
analyses of all the other counties (across Florida, across other close
states, across the entire country) to see if there were any other
anomalies?  They can't just look at this one situation in a vacuum.

Here's a real interesting page that I found while exploring the above
page:

http://danbricklin.com/log/ballotusability.htm

Reading that and some of the pages linked from it makes me strongly
feel that something should be done about these obvious mis-votes, but
I don't know what.

This is going to be real interesting ...

Milt Epstein
Research Programmer
Software/Systems Development Group
Computing and Communications Services Office (CCSO)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
mepstein at uiuc.edu