Re: The recent election (was Re: Heston's speech)

From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Thu Feb 22 2001 - 14:32:29 MST


Brian D Williams wrote:
 
> I'm curious as to what you saw that was unfair about the election.

An admission that a measurement has an error, and the realization that
a measurement without an error bar wouldn't survive even a trace of
peer scrutiny. That apart from the obvious cases of "candidate A won"
or "candidate B won" or "candidate C won" there's also "within the
error margins, we can't tell, so it's a tie", and a procedere for
resolving such. As flipping an unbiased coin, or a public duel,
or whatever.

Apart from that, anything with a "democracy" somewhere in it is supposed
to represent the meaning of majority of voters. Not representatives of
such, or some d'Hondtian games with numbers. Not to open the can of
worms of basis democracy vs. elitism...



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