[ExI] statistics detect ballot box stuffing

[spike]

-----Original Message-----
From: Alan Grimes [mailto:agrimes at speakeasy.net] 
Subject: Re: [ExI] statistics detect ballot box stuffing

spike wrote:
>> ... declare the election invalid and everything done since 2000 by the
government was a mistake, null and void, undo  everything.

>...oh? You have a way of un-murdering 1.3 million Iraquis?

--

No, sure don't Alan.  

Now do you see why I go on and on and on about verifying elections?  We have
no way of knowing if that election was valid, and no way of undoing it even
if we find after the fact that there were, for instance, ineligibles voting.
We can't CTRL Z undo that.

Note that in the 2008 senatorial elections in Minnesota, a candidate "won"
by 312 votes.  After the fact, we learn that there were 1099 ineligibles
voting in that election, plenty to overturn the results.  However, since we
currently have no way to prove how those ineligibles voted, there is no way
to undo the results.  But that "victory" caused the US to give one party a
supermajority in the senate, which allowed them to ram through the
Affordable Healthcare Act, utterly without support from the opposing party,
a law which the legislators have still never read to this day, nor has
anyone else.  We were told we needed to pass it in order to find out what is
in it, but that didn't work, for they passed it and we still don't know.  

Had that Minnesota election been verifiable and the results in some way
reversible, the party responsible for that legislation would not have won a
supermajority, in which case the bill would never have passed, for they
would be debating the actual contents of the bill to this day, all 2700 plus
pages of it, not including the 13,000 pages of associated regulations.  The
lesson to legislators would be clear: don't write 2700 page bills.  They
take decades to debate.  Legislators grow old and die before those kinds of
bills can be passed.

Now do you see why I go on and on about verifying elections, until everyone
here is sick of hearing about it?  Elections have consequences.  Most of the
time it does not, but in some cases, it really matters who wins.  The
upcoming election is one such example, and we STILL have no way of verifying
the results of an election, even after that ignominious 2000 misadventure
and the highly questionable Minnesota 2008 result.  Shameful.

spike