From: Brian D Williams (talon57@well.com)
Date: Thu Feb 22 2001 - 14:59:55 MST
From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
>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.
Excellent,I like the part about a resolution if within the margin
of error. There are of course varios tie breaking methods If it had
come to that.
>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...
Sadly the idea that we are a "democracy" is little more than a
shared delusion, the U.S. is in fact a republic at least at the
federal level.
Brian
Member:
Extropy Institute, www.extropy.org
Adler Planetarium www.adlerplanetarium.org
Life Extension Foundation, www.lef.org
National Rifle Association, www.nra.org, 1.800.672.3888
Ameritech Data Center Chicago, IL, Local 134 I.B.E.W
sheesh, that's various of course...
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