Ebbie, I'm not missing your point — I just don't think it's valid.

Unless I'm dreaming in technicolor (not unheard-of for me) I remember a wire story on the night I was putting the first of the spoiled-ballot stories in the paper that said explicitly that it was the same type of ballot used in previous elections in the state of Florida and it had never been a problem before. The whole gist of the story was that it was absurd to challenge the vote on that basis.

There's also the question — unaddressed, as far as I know — of how many of the ballots marked for Buchanan were INTENDED that way.

What you seem to be basing your (or Gore's) position on is some anecdotal evidence — always dangerous, since it requires reasoning from the specific to the general — and a pretty lame "experiment" by an academic who should know that a sampling of that size is subject to so much statistical error it's absolutely ludicrous.

If the good Dr. Sinclair knew or cared anything about research methods, he would have taken into account he's dealing with a population used to one thing and seeing how many of them will screw up if they're presented with something alien. Totally different kettle of fish from Florida voters who had seen this style ballot before.

I won't argue that the ballot couldn't be improved by putting everything in a straight line, but I still can't buy — given the number of people who DID get it right — that you can ASSUME all the others are wrong.

The only way to sort things out definitively would be to hold another vote — which in the long run would probably be less expensive than all the litigation that Gore's wasting time on.

As for the quote you pulled out, it's the kind of absurdity that sometimes gets picked up by the media (most of whom, contrary to popular belief, know absolutely nothing about statistical sampling) and repeated so often people start to believe it's fact. It ain't necessarily.

cheers,

david