With apologies to our many friends and posters outside the United States... it's time for another one of these! Culture war thread rules apply, and you are permitted to openly advocate for or against an issue or candidate on the ballot (if you clearly identify which ballot, and can do so without knocking down any strawmen along the way). "Small-scale" questions and answers are also permitted if you refrain from shitposting or being otherwise insulting to others here. Please keep the spirit of the law--this is a discussion forum!--carefully in mind.
If you're a U.S. citizen with voting rights, your polling place can reportedly be located here.
If you're still researching issues, Ballotpedia is usually reasonably helpful.
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A Tuesday Morning Black Pill: What's the Margin for Error on an Election?
TLDR: Pennsylvania is the most likely deciding state for this election. In the last two elections running, both featuring Trump, the deciding margin of votes has been so small, that in any other context in which untrained people filled out a form, we would expect more than that quantity of people to fill out the form wrong. Have a nice day.
NOTE: This entire post is premised on the idea that the results are more-or-less actual results.
Greetings from the swing township of the swing county in the swing region of the swing state. What's been on my mind lately, but which I can't find anywhere: what's the rate of people filling out their ballots incorrectly? What's the error rate? Not spoiling their ballot or otherwise destroying it so that it doesn't count, but voting for the wrong person. The voting equivalent of walking to the fridge, pouring yourself a glass of milk, then putting the glass in the fridge and carrying the jug to the breakfast table. I'm looking for the people who walk in saying "I plan to vote for [A]", walk in and mistakenly fill out their ballot for [B}, then turn it in and walk out thinking "I voted for [A]!"
Most business studies and data analysis texts put the base assumed error rate on manual data entry at around 1%, though that feels like a round number bias more than a legitimate estimate. And, of course, election day is just about the worst case scenario for manual data entry! Even the best voters only fill out a ballot twice a year, more commonly it's somewhere between every two and every four, and for many voters it will be even longer. Millions of voters will be filling out this particular ballot for the first time, either because they have never voted before, or because the ballot layout has changed since they last voted. Voters will often be waiting in line for hours before they have the opportunity to vote, often at the end of the day after work. Mistakes will be made.
But it's impossible to measure under actual conditions, as it's impossible to distinguish voting by error from voting secretly (except under particularly egregious conditions, like tens of thousands of liberal Palm Beach Jews mysteriously voting for Pat Buchanan in 2000). It's totally permissible, to return to my platonic ideal scenario, to walk in wearing a "WOMEN'S RIGHTS ARE HUMAN RIGHTS" T shirt and vote straight Republican once your wife isn't looking over your shoulder. America considers that not just permissible, but your right, and an important part of the system. The votes are immediately anonymized anyway.
But I've been unable to find anyone talking about plain voter error, any studies done under laboratory conditions to determine a likely percentage. Because, for the Cathedral construed most broadly, this idea is just too scary, it's too existentially dreadful: for some closeness of election, the result doesn't actually reflect anything but luck. A 1% error rate, which is the bare minimum and it is likely higher, would quite frequently swing an election as close as several swing states have been in recent elections. Our political parties have optimized us right out of democracy, the choice is so narrow that there is no real choice occurring. The result will likely reflect the will of the people only in the most tenuous sense.
Bush v. Gore involved over 5.8 million votes. At least 113,820 of those marked multiple candidates and thus could not be counted. That suggests a 1.95% baseline.
Here MIT corroborates the 1% number, but they don’t give their source in turn.
I can’t remember if my voting machine even allowed that sort of error. It definitely said “CHOOSE ONE OR NONE.” next to each office. Did they use checkboxes or radio buttons?
Anyway, I don’t see any reason to invoke the Cathedral. Research is rare (but not verboten) because it’s hard, not because it’s existential. After the “butterfly ballots” it was a reasonably popular topic.
I think your search results were just clouded by news stories about polling error, which is much more important to organizations trying to make their predictions.
Method varied by county, but in 2000 Florida a lot of the recount counties used punch cards. You needed to poke a hole with the stylus on a paper ballot and then they were machine counted. So it was easy to poke multiple holes or not poke all the way through. There were also overvotes where someone would punch "Gore" then write in "Gore" in the write in space.
La Griffe Du Lion had a take on the 2000 Florida ballots back in 2001, http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/elec2000.htm
Oh, no, the insanity of the "hanging chads" was much worse than that.
First, you could poke all the way through and not have the machine count it, because the chad happened to still be attached by one or two corners and could thus fold out of the way of your punch but then fold back into place to prevent the scanner from seeing a hole. In the Palm Beach County recounts they had to decide on rules about how a "Tri Chad" with only one separated corner would still count as a vote but a "Pregnant Chad" pushed out but still attached at four corners would not count.
Second, in theory you could not poke through a chad but still have it get counted, because the whole process of the recounts was that you got a bunch of partisans on all sides to manhandle a bunch of paper designed to be easily torn. You think it's bad when a printed paper ballot isn't immediately read perfectly by the scanner/tallier? Imagine if each time someone tried to scan it it got more smudged than the last...
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