The 2004 Election Debacle ... A Premonition Or Happening Before Our Eyes?
Topic: 4) A Random Walk
Today I was part of a conversation with some of the faculty at the Cox School of Business at Southern Methodist University (SMU), and we lightly touched on the subject of the election. Now I have a technology and operational process bent to me, so perhaps my concerns about this election are just a combination of reading CNN news about e-voting security (here), hearing rumors that people are voting multiple times simply by identifying themselves as another person at other voting locations (since people don't have to provide photo ID in some cases), getting secondhand information about mechanical ballot completion being misleading in terms of some districts allowing people to vote with one punch (but where the detailed ballot doesn't follow that instruction perfectly), and seeing that the polls are so close between Bush and Kerry (does statistical significance play a role in vote counting?). To top my heightened sense of anxiety about the election, I couldn't even take advantage of voting early in the University Park area of Dallas ... the lines were like one to two hours long at 10:20AM today.


This stuff is all starting to sound very troublesome. Can we just let the folks at JibJab settle this (here)?


Steve Shu
Managing Director
S4 Management Group
Email: sshu@s4management.com
Web: http://www.s4management.com