Looking for article or quote that said 12 votes per precinct

[woodsprite]

would have tipped Ohio to Kerry. My daughter has to write a persuasive piece for her humanities/social studies class and she has chosen "Grand Theft Election - The Presidential Election of 2004" as her title. She made her selection and came up with the title all on her own. YUP! I'm beaming with pride. :)

She told me a bit late to pull docs for her (she's in 6th grade honors classes and said "mom, I need supporting docs by tomorrow"). So I've been scrounging DU, printed some of Conyers report for her and went out to the Congressional Record and printed out both Dem and Repub speeches.

That seems plenty enough since she only has to do 5-10 pages, but I thought that one piece of info really puts Ohio into perspective for nonbelivers. Plus, her teacher is a "bushbaby" so I'm getting some satisfaction out of this too. Don't like her a whole lot :)

[GreenPartyVoter]

1. Ooh... A bushbaby teacher. Hehehe.. this could be REALLY good!

Do you have this resource yet?

http://fairnessbybeckerman.blogspot.com/

[Lurker321]

2. You don't need an article -

there are 11,000+ precincts in Ohio. 11,000*12=132,000 votes. Bush's margin was 118,000 votes. 132,000 > 118,000.

[Zan_of_Texas]

3. Or, put another way....

You only need half as many precincts if you FLIP votes. If you FLIP votes, you are in effect ADDING Bush votes while you SUBTRACT Kerry votes.

Article:

EVEN A REMOTE CHANCE?

January 7, 2005
Online Journal
http://onlinejournal.com/evoting/010705Anderson/010705anderson.html

Imagine sitting in your favorite easy chair with a remote control, and being able to just push EJECT and get George Bush out of office. Or, let's say you're on your laptop, and you can dial up a regime change.

"Hmm," you say, "I'm feeling like blue today. Blue is a nice color. I think I'd rather have Kerry for president." Let's say you're up late, it's November 2nd, you see that Kerry is losing in Ohio, and you say, "the HELL with that!" So, with your laptop, you dial into the tabulator for, let's just say, 41 of 88 counties in Ohio. And, you switch 14 votes per precinct from Bush to Kerry. Voila. Kerry wins.

Could that happen?

Or, um, the other way around -- Kerry is winning, and someone dials in and changes a dozen or so votes in each of roughly half the precincts in Ohio, and VOILA, Bush wins Ohio. (A flip of a dozen votes in 5000 precincts would result in a net change of 120,000 votes in Ohio, more than the current margin separating the two candidates.)

<snip>

[woodsprite]

4. DUer's are GEMS!!!

Thanks! She has a week to write the piece. So far tonight, I've printed out 75 pgs of exerpts for her. I printed out the OnLine Journal article so she can actually "source" something for her teacher when she does the math in her article.

[harmonyguy]

6. DUer's are GEMS??????

I realize that you meant this as a wonderful compliment to those who chimed in to help, however when talking about voting and elections, the word GEMS can take on a less than positive meaning.

Global Election Management System, or GEMS, is the name of the tablulator software sold by Diebold Election Systems.

Oops .......

No harm - no foul. Just some Sunday night humour.
HG ;-)

[EC]

5. Tell your daughter

to let us know her teachers reaction. Is this to be an oral report?

[L. Coyote]

7. Scan this page

http://www.jqjacobs.net/bush/

and you can follow the first link ("How Kerry...") to Ohio summary data with number of votes, etc.