Wednesday, November 03, 2004

MARGIN OF ERROR: What we know and what we don't know

It's down to Ohio, Iowa and New Mexico. White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has just made a speech in which he stated as fact that Bush was winning Ohio by 140,000 votes and this was "statistically insurmountable". His source was Republican Ohio Secretary Kenneth Blackwell.

Meanwhile, Blackwell's office informed UK journalists in Ohio that they had no figures for the number of provisional ballots. Funny that. Classic Karl Rove stuff, of course. Keep repeating it and they're bound to believe it. Some of Card's remarks sounded as if he was going to have Kerry sent to Guantanamo Bay, but agin you have to remember that this is bully politics.

What else? Apart from Count the goddamn votes!, we can say that the blogosphere showed pretty badly, me included. Blogs are basically a time medium, and this introduces a bias towards chasing the very latest report. You could blog depression but not suicide.

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