Despite what the media told us about “massive turnouts” Election Day and for some time thereafter, less than half of the eligible voters went to the polls. As it stands now, the figure is showing a 49 percent national turnout. Once all of the “undervotes” are considered, this figure is liable to drop to 47 percent or less. Estimates now are that undervotes were at least 1.6 percent across the board and up to as much as 3.9 percent in some areas like Illinois and 5 percent in Idaho.

As much as it amuses me to see the liberal media spread its ineptitude all over the place, this 24 hour coverage of minutia is beginning to take its toll. There certainly isn’t much point in watching the henhouse talkover coffee-klatching experts and commentators being shown a good part of the time. Nor is there much point in watching the media get up to speed on the Constitution, Electoral College or the legal system in Florida and elsewhere.

Perhaps most important is the media’s obvious lack of experts in data processing. While they are dealing with archaic methods and equipment from the fifties, the media has absolutely failed to bring us any of the experts from this era. Even with 24 hours to fill with something in line with their “hot topic.”

It’s very hard to believe that the media hasn’t tried to contact experts with IBM, the inventor of the card/sorter breakthrough that so long ago relieved us of so much drudgery and then went on to better things, leaving droppings for the “after market” firms to pick up. Nor that they haven’t been able to dig up old users of this equipment, like myself, for their opinion. I’m sorry, it’s much more likely that they did contact people who knew what they were talking about in this era and area—and the media didn’t like the answers they got.

To double check on the kind of answers they might get, I decided to look up old friends in the business when I was processing market research data in Chicago. I wanted to see if they were laughing their butts off as much as I’ve been doing. Here’s what I got.

The Nut of it

One of the most knowledgeable statisticians I’ve ever known told me: “Look Ed, everything they’re doing in South Florida is within the margin of error.” From there, we talked details and old times.

That may not seem like much to you, but here’s what it means. If they are dealing with possible errors in less than one percent of the data, and the margin of error with either machines or hand counting is two percent or better, then it’s mathematically impossible to ever get the answer, to ever get a true and accurate count. In fact, every time you run the data in a vacuum, it’s going to turn out different.

When the margin of error is greater than what you’re trying to find, you’re chances of resolution are practically zero.

Sweeping answer, isn’t it? It means that all of the counters and lawyers in Florida are now wasting their time on a venture as hopeless as others were proven long ago by Werner Hiesenberg’s Principle of Discontinuity—the Law of Uncertainty.

It’s even sort of ironic, since I have long believed that the legal profession took Hiesenberg’s molecular theory to mean that there were no entitative absolutes (which is true) and interpreted it to mean, in their profession, that anything could be argued from any angle (which does not follow).

The basis for the principle that shook the world of physics was, by the way, that in trying to study the molecular, the very introduction of human observation brings with it a factor that makes the object studied behave in a manner other than it would behave in a natural state. Therefore, you could never know molecular behavior except by inference and experiment.

Using an improper analogy, shine a light on a lobster at night and he’ll behave differently than he would in the dark. And you only infer that he’s sleeping when the light isn’t on him. Actually, they’re nocturnal.

Applied to the molar world, it might mean that election commissions behave differently when national media has its cameras focused on them.

Do I trust my statistician contact? Absolutely. The last time we met face-to-face, he was working on a project for the M&M company. They made each flavor separately. Then they mixed them all up. My friend’s task was to figure out what the probability was for a single package to be without one of the colors/flavors. You want to try to figure that one out, and write up your methodology?

What do we do about it

We reconcile. Something that Al Gore is not willing to do. If the same error applies across the board, if every polling place in the country has the same problems as Florida, then we simply accept it and live with the results. You might want to start thinking about better equipment next time, more control of the variables, but you don’t try to chase ghosts in a vacuum. You’ve got to be nuts to do that.

Let me try to put it another way. When the IBM machines first came out, they were a wonderful boon over hand counting thousands of long questionnaires. The machines were much faster and much more accurate than humans with rubber tips on almost every finger.

Machines don’t think about sex half of the time. They don’t take cigarette or coffee breaks, go to the bathroom, scratch themselves, talk to each other, worry about the kids or whatever. They just count. They cannot be distracted without pulling the plug. And yes, the old ones had a margin of error, even when they were in excellent condition. Errors that had little or nothing to do with chads.

But their margin of error was considerably less than the human, particularly if the human counters have a personal stake in the outcome. If someone likes chocolate M&Ms over lime or strawberry.

If machines could talk, if we had Isaac Asimov’s positronic robots, they would probably be telling us about “garbage in, garbage out.” How they can’t help it if humans don’t understand the game or procedure, can’t punch the cards right. Better teach them. And, better luck next time.

In the same old days, we didn’t complain about our spring-wound watches. The old Bulova, Elgin, Longines and other brands that we had to wind almost daily. We simply lived with them. In fact, we didn’t know any better.

When Timex brought out the pin lever movement, didn’t play the jewelry game, and gave us good timepieces for the price of cleaning the older ones, most of us bought these even though their two-four-six-eight dial configuration was sort of hum-drum.

When the quartz crystal meshed with 60 cycle electricity matching our way of keeping track of before and after in minutes and seconds, we moved forward again. Now you can strap a mini-computer to your wrist and survey with satellite Ground Positioning Systems

Never, never did we even think about going back to sundials or sand filled hour glasses, not only because they would be clumsy but the margin for error would be so much greater.

How on earth can we dogmatically believe that hand counting is more accurate than the machines developed for this purpose only? Especially when we all accept scanned credit cards, supermarket bar codes, and Cape Canavaral shoots rockets to the moon and further. It’s almost like arguing that the world is flat rather than round. Why did we ever turn to machines at all?

And yes, there were all the old bugaboo stories of robots taking the place of humans in the fifties. Stories I hadn’t heard mentioned again until this election.

And isn’t there an element of responsibility in the “right to vote?” Anyone who can pick their nose ought to be able to properly pick their choice for President.