Noise and politics

Social Studies of Science

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2001, Pages 446-454

  Lynch, Michael ^a  

^a Department of Obstetrics Gynecology   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0035536131     PISSN: 03063127     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/030631201031003013     Document Type: Article

References (26)

1. nd 1243, LEXIS 2373; Fla. L. Weekly S1113, 8 December 2000. The judicial opinions in the case were published in the New York Times (9 December 2000), A19. Although Justice Wells was outvoted in a 4-3 ruling, a few days later the US Supreme Court majority, in a 5-4 vote, sided with Wells and called an end to the protracted struggle over the Florida election result.
2. nd 1243, LEXIS 2373; 25 Fla. L. Weekly S1113, 8 December 2000. The judicial opinions in the case were published in the New York Times (9 December 2000), A19. Although Justice Wells was outvoted in a 4-3 ruling, a few days later the US Supreme Court majority, in a 5-4 vote, sided with Wells and called an end to the protracted struggle over the Florida election result.
3. New York Times (22 November 2000), A27.
4. Wells did not consider what some commentators argued was a more rational option: splitting the 25 Florida electoral votes between Bush and Gore (a procedure that would have handed the election to Gore).
5. John Allen Paulos, 'How Florida's Chief Judge Misquoted Me', Philadelphia Daily News (11 December 2000), accessed through http://dailynews.phil...news/2000/12/11/opinion/ PAUL11.htm. Despite what the headline suggests, Paulos does not complain that Wells 'misquoted' him. Instead, he complains about the conclusions Wells and others drew from Paulos' editorial.
6. Irving Langmuir, 'Pathological Science', General Electric R&D Center Report No. 68-C-035 (Schenectady, NY, April 1968); reprinted (transcribed and edited by Robert N. Hall) in Physics Today,Vol. 42, No. 10 (October 1989), 36-48. For a polemical application of Langmuir to the legal domain, see Peter Huber, Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 25-33.
7. Irving Langmuir, 'Pathological Science', General Electric R&D Center Report No. 68-C-035 (Schenectady, NY, April 1968); reprinted (transcribed and edited by Robert N. Hall) in Physics Today,Vol. 42, No. 10 (October 1989), 36-48. For a polemical application of Langmuir to the legal domain, see Peter Huber, Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 25-33.
8. Irving Langmuir, 'Pathological Science', General Electric R&D Center Report No. 68-C-035 (Schenectady, NY, April 1968); reprinted (transcribed and edited by Robert N. Hall) in Physics Today,Vol. 42, No. 10 (October 1989), 36-48. For a polemical application of Langmuir to the legal domain, see Peter Huber, Galileo's Revenge: Junk Science in the Courtroom (New York: Basic Books, 1991), 25-33.
9. Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris, etc., et al., Volusia County Canvassing Board v. Katherine Harris, etc., et al., Florida Democratic Party v. Katherine Harris, etc., et al., Nos. SC00-2346, SC00-2348 & SC00-2349, Supreme Court of Florida, 772 So. 2d 1220; 2000 Fla. LEXIS 2311; 2000 Daily Journal DAR 12457; 25 Fla. L. Weekly S 1062, 21 November 2000. This was the first of two rulings by the Florida Supreme Court. The second ruling (Gore v. Harris, op. cit. note 1) was the second of the two.
10. The other gross category of uncounted votes was 'overvotes': ballots that registered more than one candidate for President. Overvotes were more numerous than undervotes. The Miami-Dade County Board and many other observers assumed that it would be fruitless to manually inspect overvote ballots, since there would be no legal way to count ballots in which more than one Presidential candidate was marked. Later, after the US Supreme Court ordered a halt to the hand count effort, various journalists were given access to the ballots and began a lengthy effort to recount all of the 180,110 uncounted ballots in Florida. Early reports indicated that hundreds of 'overvotes' could have been counted because the voter had marked both the name of a candidate (e.g. Gore) and wrote the name of the same candidate in the 'write in' slot of the ballot.
11. Both quotations from Jane Mayer, 'Blame the Press!', The New Yorker (11 December 2000), 42.
12. As Bruce Lewenstein notes in this issue, Paulos later stated that 'margin of error' might better be construed as 'margin of interpretation' in the politico-legal context: Bruce V. Lewenstein, 'Expertise in the Media', Social Studies of Science, Vol. 31, No. 3 (June 2001), 449-52.
13. David Corn speculates that these ballots may have resulted from hanging chads being dislodged during the machine count and recount: 'In the Field of Chads', The Nation, Vol. 272, No. 4 (29 January 2001), 22-26. Others (such as Chief Justice Wells) suggested that the manual handling of ballots could result in the deliberate or inadvertent marking of them.
14. Turnout in Florida was higher in 2000 than in the 1996 election (6,145,220 compared to 5,437,964). African-American turnout was estimated to be 65% higher, and four out of ten of these voters came to the polls for the first time: Mark Danner, 'The Road to Illegitimacy', New York Review of Books, Vol. 68, No. 3 (22 February 2001), 48-51, at 50.
15. Seven justices concurred that the Florida Supreme Court's ruling raised 'equal protection' concerns, but only five of those justices (a bare majority of the Court) agreed that there was insufficient time to enable more adequate standards to be implemented in hand recounts. The latter aspect of the decision was the clincher.
16. Bush v. Gore, op. cit. note 1, reproduced in the New York Times (9 December 2000), A18.
17. Ibid.; Dissent by Wells, op. cit. note 1, New York Times (9 December 2000), A19.
18. Ibid.; Dissent by Wells, op. cit. note 1, New York Times (9 December 2000), A19.
19. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Concurring Opinion (with Justices Scalia and Thomas), George W. Bush and Richard Cheney v. Albert Gore Jr et al., US Supreme Court, 531 US 98; 121 S. Ct. 525; 2000 US; LEXIS 8430, 12 December 2000, reprinted in New York Times (14 December 2000), A33-36, at A34.
20. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Concurring Opinion (with Justices Scalia and Thomas), George W. Bush and Richard Cheney v. Albert Gore Jr et al., US Supreme Court, 531 US 98; 121 S. Ct. 525; 2000 US; LEXIS 8430, 12 December 2000, reprinted in New York Times (14 December 2000), A33-36, at A34.
21. This circular relationship between acceptance of a datum (vote) and judgements about its competent production recalls Collins' concept of 'experimenters' regress': H.M. Collins, Changing Order: Replication and Induction in Scientific Practice (London: Sage, 1985), 79-106.
22. Rehnquist's exclusion of votes on grounds of incompetence was a gentler form of a challenge he was alleged to have administered decades ago. During the 1964 national election, Rehnquist was identified as a participant in 'Operation Eagle Eye', a Republican Party campaign for challenging selected voters at polling places. Witnesses claimed to have seen Rehnquist at an Arizona polling place in a heavily minority district, holding up a long queue of voters while challenging non-native English speakers with lengthy questions to test their ability to interpret passages of the US Constitution. Though legal at the time, this informal 'literacy test' had the presumed effect of suppressing minority (presumptively Democratic) votes. During his confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court in 1971, Rehnquist denied the charge of personally intimidating voters. See Dennis Roddy, 'Just our Bill', Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (2 December 2000).
23. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, quoted in Danner, op. cit. note 11, 48.
24. The ascription of incompetence to 'naïve' and minority voters (presumed to be aligned with the Democrats) was confounded when a number of news organizations began to report results of their reviews of disputed ballots in Florida. In early April 2001, the national newspaper USA Today summarized the reviews of 61,195 'undervotes' by a national accounting firm BDO Seidman, hired by The Miami Herald and Knight Ridder Newspapers. USA Today presented four different tallies based on standards of what to count, ranging from 'lenient' (count any ballot with a mark on or near the box for a specific candidate) to 'strict' (only count completely punched ballots that, for some reason, eluded machine counts). The results were contrary to presumptions by both parties that Gore would benefit from a more 'lenient' standard for counting votes, whereas Bush would benefit from a strict standard. The tallies showed Gore ahead - by a bare three votes - for the strictest standard, and Bush gaining increased margins of victory when the standards were relaxed. See Dennis Cauchon, 'Newspapers' Recount Shows Bush Prevailed in Florida Vote', USA Today (4 April 2001), IA, 8A-9A.
25. See Lucy Suchman, Plans and Situated Actions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 163-70 (a more specific reference will appear in the forthcoming 2nd edn of this book).
26. The argument presumes that machine counts are definitive and begs the question of why Florida's election code includes provisions for hand recounts. A discrepancy of several hundred votes between the machine count and recount in Florida, and the fact that some punch-card ballots in the 'undervote' pile had fully detached chads, indicate that machines may have missed 'legal' votes as Rehnquist defines them. This is to leave aside the fact that there is more than one way to mark a ballot in accordance with the instructions Rehnquist quotes.