Dear Log,
This just in: White people snared in gun-totin' raid on an unAmerican restaurant full of unAmericans. And at ten past the hour, a roundup of this summer's blockbuster movies! Boy, huffing glue sure makes the news go down better. Is it Election Day yet?
Voting W out of office isn't going to fix this kind of fuckage I think. I keep having daily affirmations as to why I'm glad I left and will never, ever return to the US. Maybe move to Iraq as I hear they're going to have one hell of a democracy, unlike the US, sometime soon.
Re:election day?
vsergu on 2003-05-02T13:04:34
Now that they've gone a long way to eliminating pesky problems like exit polling and recounts (not possible with unauditable voting machines), I'm not at all sure that we'll be able to vote him out, even if the majority wants to. Besides, by then we'll be at war again, and it would be unpatriotic to vote against the Commander in Chief.
And I'm writing from Washington, DC, where we've never had a democracy.Re:election day?
pudge on 2003-05-07T04:08:12
Yes, exit polling IS a big problem. Its only real purpose it to tell the people who won before the counting is done, and it has failed miserably in recent attempts to do so.Re:election day?
vsergu on 2003-05-07T04:25:10
I'm not thrilled about the frenzy to get results instantly. Announcements of exit-poll results probably do affect voting, especially on the west coast. And of course the desire for instant results is one of the pressures behind the drive for electronic voting.
My point was that if we have unauditable voting machines with no possibility of a recount, the only way to tell whether something's wrong is to have exit polls. It's highly imperfect, but it's better than nothing.Re:election day?
pudge on 2003-05-07T04:39:00
OK, I understand your point. However, to that, I know something about exit polling, and about fudging election results, and I don't believe exit polls could tell you if something were wrong.
First, and most importantly, any reasonable cheating attempt would almost surely keep the results within an exit poll's margin of error (which is great). Second, exit polls can be fudged too.
The real solution is not exit polls, but auditable machines.Re:election day?
vsergu on 2003-05-07T04:53:42
Your last sentence indicates that we agree on the important point. I do believe that exit polls can reveal some problems, though. Not all discrepancies between recorded votes and intended votes are caused by cheating, and sometimes such discrepancies can exceed poll error margins (the Buchanan votes from the butterfly ballot might be an example).Re:election day?
pudge on 2003-05-07T11:16:00
Well, I am not against exit polls; I am against using them in the news to report who "won."
Re:countdowns
ziggy on 2003-05-02T21:30:42
Good news! He has less than 1,000,000 minutes left!:-)
