Interesting People mailing list archives
More on Election and a general editorial comment
From: Dave Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:27:34 -0400
First an Iper sent me the following: "How about Civil Discourse and sending out only verified material for a change. " I am neither equiped with the resources to verify things or motivated to only send out verified items. I select material to make one thing and question. I held off for a while on sending many things waiting for addirtional information but not always. Just for the record, if the press had held off on Nixon till it was "verified" we would have lost a major opportunity to show the limits of poower. Dave ------ Forwarded Message From: Henry Minsky <hqm () ai mit edu> Date: Thu, 10 Jul 2003 12:06:28 -0400 To: dave () farber net Subject: Re: [IP] How to Rig an American Election These conspiracy theories about rigging of elections by tampering with the voting machine programming are far-fetched and also completely miss the most alarming lessons of the last presidential election. I think that people and the media were not sufficiently astonished by the terribly close margins which the elections were won. People should be asking how is it that the votes are so very precisly close to 50% on each candidate or issue. The answer is that there is a frighteningly effective use of polling and other techniques to carefully quantify what people are planning to vote for which issues, and to apply money in precise leverage points to only bring in votes where they will swing an election. There is nothing illegal or maybe even unethical about this, but it basically says that the party or candidate with the most money will generally win. That shouldn't be a surprise, but it strikes me as sad and naive that this vote-machine tampering conspiracy meme is going around, when the results are clearly explainable by the influence of wealth and better polling technology on elections. ------ End of Forwarded Message ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as interesting-people () lists elistx com To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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