It’s Not Who Votes That Counts

…but who counts the votes.

Isn’t it funny how these close elections almost always go the Dems’ way?

I have to say that they shouldn’t take much comfort from this. All that outside money and the union thuggery, and all they could manage was a dead heat in Wisconsin?

[Late afternoon update]

Hey, if you can’t find the votes you need, shred the votes the other guy needs…

[Bumped]

67 thoughts on “It’s Not Who Votes That Counts”

  1. I know most of you prefer your opinions, with all their bias, to data, but studies show that close elections tend to go to the party that has the better structural advantage. I.e. more money and better organization.

    If you are interested here is a paper on it from some Stanford University testing a model using results from U.S. House elections from 1880 to 2008.

    http://www.stanford.edu/~jgrimmer/CEF.pdf

    So if the Tea Party wants these types of elections to go there way the lesson is to get better organized.

    But then this should be no surprise as organization has always been the key to political victories.

  2. Alan,

    Its the balance between a secret ballot and preventing fraud. You could prevent all fraud if you knew exactly how each individual voted. But if you wish to allow folks to keep their choice secret then elements like cameras could be seen as a violation of it.

    And keep in mind the purpose of a secret ballot is discourage coercive force being used. i.e. Your party boss may tell you how you are suppose to vote but as long as the ballot is secret they will never KNOW if you did as instructed.

    Now in terms of better monitoring of ballots and the counting process, anything you are able to do to document and record it will indeed increase public confidence in the outcome.

  3. Andrea: my sister was never in very good health. That may have been related to the fact that she was unusually short, almost a legal midget. I don’t know the details of how she got pneumonia; the doctors weren’t all that helpful, frankly. However, there has been a general increase in the number of disease cases, and I expect that that is mostly a result of the anti-vaccine hysteria. I do realize that there is no pneumonia vaccine, but it still seems odd that someone would get a chronically returning case of pneumonia and then die from it. When I was growing up, nobody ever died of pneumonia unless they were either very old or else very weak children. Something changed somewhere. But thanks for your concern. You too, Bob-1.

  4. Ken, interestingly, there is a fairly new pneumonia vaccine which prevents against one type of pneumonia – google “pneumonia vaccine” to learn more. I’m not a doctor but I think Andrea is right: the thing that changed is the rise of antibiotic-resistant strains of bacteria, and that is being caused by the improper use of antibiotics. The anti-vac people have caused other problems, mostly allowing children to go unprotected against specific diseases like the mumps.

    You’d probably be well-served by sorting it all out on a reputable medical website like mayoclinic.com. For example: http://www.mayoclinic.com/health/antibiotics/FL00075 and you can learn about other subjects such as pneumonia there too.

  5. Ken,

    I am very sorry to hear about your sister. My condolences to you and your family.

    Andrea is right. The increased misuse of antibiotics has resulted in many bacteria developing immunity which is what has changed. When the antibiotics were new in t he 1940’s and 1950’s they nearly wiped out diseases like pneumonia, but the bacteria that survived did so because they were resistant to them which is why many of those diseases are making a come back.

    Sadly the anti-vaccine movement is neither left or right, but tends to cross those lines and represents more a mistrust in science than anything else. For example both Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh urged folks NOT to get the Swine-Flu vaccine on their shows.

    http://mediamatters.org/research/200910070043

    Beck, Limbaugh fomenting fear about H1N1 vaccine
    October 07, 2009 10:25 pm ET

    I expect a large number of folks suffered needless illness as a result of listening to them.

    As a side note, I have a chronic condition, severe Asthma, that has plagued me since I was 2 and so I am always first in line to get the flu shot every year as I am in highest risk group in terms of getting complications, like pneumonia, from flu.

  6. Actually, Ken, it is quite common these days for people already in frail health, as you say your sister was, to get recurring episodes of pneumonia, which eventually can kill them. I’ve known people who had it more than once. They are people who already had auto-immune problems like rheumatoid arthritis and lupus, or had chronic asthma, or diabetes. People who are healthy tend not to get pneumonia, though it’s a common complication of things like the flu. This is why you don’t want the flu, even if you’re healthy.

  7. Getting back to the election…

    Seems that Prosser acquired 7500 votes. The thing won’t be over til around the 15th of April, when the canvassing will be done.

  8. “Now, Andrea, be nice: “Bob-1″ is new to our planet (they assigned him that name before leaving the homeworld).”

    I like Planet Claire myself.

  9. Its the balance between a secret ballot and preventing fraud.

    I was brainstorming about the possibility of using cameras as a guard against two abuses: ballot box stuffing and whatever fraudulent vote counting schemes exist. The counting is done after the voting, so that doesn’t run afoul of the secret ballot.

    Cameras watching ballot boxes wouldn’t be looking into voting booths – but (depending on where they aim) they can identify who showed up at the polls. If I knew more about how ballot stuffing is done, I’d have a better idea of how and if cameras would be handy.

    Seems that Prosser acquired 7500 votes.

    Don’t mess with descendants of Genghis Khan. Your house might be the next to get demolished for bypass construction.

  10. Its the balance between a secret ballot and preventing fraud.

    After validation issue a voter card, each with a unique national random number. Comparison against a database would then validate the vote. Numbers that are not issued are invalid. Duplicates would signal an investigation.

  11. In Texas, each voting station has a printout of all the voters’ names. Voter brings card, election volunteer insures name on card is on the list, voter signs blank next to his/her name on list, voter gets paper ballot.

    That doesn’t tell us how ballot stuffing schemes work. How do they do it in Chicago? Half the skeletons are in politicians closets, and the other half vote. Or Minnesota – how did they find extra Al Franken votes in someone’s trunk and get away with it?

  12. Alan,

    Yes, and in Texas the Texas Rangers investigate reports of voter fraud and irregularities. And you know their reputation 🙂

    The historic origin of the term ballot stuffing came from the 19th Century when after the voting was done a work at the precinct in the pay of the local political machine would just stuff the box. So making the boxes full proof to tampering at the end of voting is one solution. But with states going to machines entirely new possibilities exist.

  13. Seems that Prosser acquired 7500 votes.

    He didn’t acquire them: a county clerk did an oopsie with a database and Excel and did not tell the AP about an entire cities worth of votes. She caught the error when the results were submitted to the state and a big ol ‘0’ showed up.

  14. He didn’t acquire them: a county clerk did an oopsie with a database and Excel and did not tell the AP about an entire cities worth of votes.

    That’s correct. And the votes from that city were reported by a local news outlet while everybody else was believing the AP.

  15. The left is now QQ because they didn’t know how many votes to manufacture. So sad…

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