Re: statistical study after next Tues election

On Nov 1, 2004, at 12:27 PM, Kathy Dopp wrote:

>>> Douglas W. Jones said:
>>
>> DRE machines and lever voting machines do not permit overvotes to be
>> recorded, so you get overvote counts of zero. The statistics I've
>> seen
>> show that DRE machines seem to be recording undervote rates of
>> between 1
>> and 2 percent,
>
> Doug,
>
> Aren't those two statements contradictory? How can DREs have zero
> over-votes (that is what I thought) and also be recording overvote
> rates
> of 1 to 2 %?

Undervotes! Undervotes are not overvotes! Undervotes are where the
voter records no vote at all.

I suspect that, on many voting systems, there are also misvotes, where
voters intend to vote for Jones, for example, and end up voting for
Smith. The rate of such misvotes is very hard to measure.

                Doug Jones
                jones@cs.uiowa.edu
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Received on Tue Nov 30 23:17:02 2004