Sunday, June 02, 2013
Clarion Ledger: State will help build Biloxi baseball stadium
(blogs.clarionledger.com)
Read More...Gov. Phil Bryant, at a Coast press conference with Beau Rivage workers dressed as ballpark vendors and handing out CrackerJacks, today announced the state will kick in $15 million of BP oil disaster money to help build a baseball stadium in Biloxi.
He also announced that an ownership group he’s been working with since last year is about to buy a team to play there, although its name and pro team affiliation would not be announced until later.
Talk recently around Biloxi has centered on the ...
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Page 161 of 227 pages
‹ First < 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 > Last ›While we're at this, we might as well take some small moment to recognize the fact that the subset of "white people" who choose to live in North or West Philadelphia are probably not listening to Rush Limbaugh on a daily basis.
Until you're able to conceptualize what a precinct is -- how many of them there are nationwide, how many there are in Philly, and then also understand how some urban precincts tend to be very concentrated with like-minded voters for any number of sundry reasons, this is pointless.
Or -- how many zero vote Obama precincts do I need to find before "that's weird" too?
We've already got 3... do I need to find 20? 30? How many Obama zero vote precincts before it's worthy of 'investigation'... or - again - is there some specific aspect of these particular 59 precincts that makes them more suspicious than those in other areas?
If in one of the remaining precints we see results of "only" 250 for Obama and 83 for Romney (75% vs. the 83%, for example), should that be investigated?
I'd call it unlikely. But certainly not implausible.
I'm not denying those 7245 at-bats are cherry-picked. But Cobb had ~600 hitless games. What are the chances of that?
EDIT: would be a lot cooler if we actually knew the number of hitless games, but BB-Ref's game logs "only" date back to 1918. What a worthless site. ;)
But this is more like: there were 5 months in Ty Cobb's career where he didn't get a hit.
In Philadelphia's 21st Ward (containing 45 precincts) -- I find no less than 15!!! precincts where Romney outperformed his city-wide split! He got 30-35% in some of those precincts even though he got less than 15% city-wide!
This should be investigated.
If there's fraud that is going to impact the outcome of an election, it's not in the voting, it's in the counting.
Sure - November, December, January, February, and March.
I think that using "implausible" when confronted with statistics that don't meet your expectations is a risky game right about now. It was also "implausible" that the electorate would look like 2008.
I live outside of Philadelphia and have done a ton of volunteering in some of those North Philly districts, and while zero is a bit suprising I'm not completely shocked. I'm actually a bit suprised that Romney did as well as he did with African-Americans overall. Obviously the Republican brand is a damaged one with AAs, but couple that with Voter ID which was a huge issue and Mormonism's history with AA, the thought of people voting in such overwhelming terms isn't "implausible" especially in the all AA areas.
If there were 5 years when Cobb was ~98% likely to NOT get a hit, then yeah, 5 months where he went hitless probably isn't implausible.
But that would be a hell of a nagging injury, eh? Probably should have shut him down and let him rehab or something.
Based on your posting history, one could call you that already, so fire away.
Agreed 100%. Written better than my post making the same point, which served as the "flip" to the current page...
We're not talking normal distributions. We're talking about cherry-picking the extreme right edge of groups which on average skew 315-17 (or something close)
Shutouts are probably less surprising than one of these precincts going 280-52.
But yeah. Investigate anyhow. Not that any finding short of "stolen election" will satisfy the critics from the right.
And for comparison, Lincoln got 0.9% of the vote in his home state.
This assumes that each vote is an independent random trial with 99-1 (or 98-2 or 95-5) odds, which of course it isn't. But there you go.
Dude, the link you already posted presented a bunch of tweets about voting multiple times as evidence of voter fraud. I don't think you could get much worse than that.
His average that year was .357.
The odds that he'd go 17 consecutive at-bats without a hit are about 1-in-1822, or 0.05%.
Implausible, but it still happened!
Thanks for doing the heavy lifting!
While I'm not on the Voter Fraud is Significant bandwagon, this is one of the worst non-crazy arguments imaginable. You can find a multitude of instances in which people do something in which the benefit is disproportionately small compared to the costs or the possible punishment. We just spend pages talking about one of probably a billion examples you can find. It would legitimately rape logic if someone said "David Petraeus did not cheat on his wife because the benefits of having sex with a particular woman not his wife is not anywhere near commensurate with the punishment, losing his CIA director post and ending his career and life's work in disgrace and becoming the thing he is most known for by history."
It takes all of 5 seconds on google to find a man convicted of murder because of a dispute over a sandwich. I didn't even know about the case, I just typed murder and sandwich in Google. Then I typed in murder and hat and got multiple hat-related murders on the front page.
In Minneapolis, my precinct had just under 2000 votes -- that's about equal to 6 of Philly's precincts.
And in north Minneapolis, whose neighborhoods range from 30-60% black, these larger precincts were still voting 90-95% Obama. Isolate some of those into near-100% black populations, and you may have seen a couple shutouts here too -- and this is a city of 17% black population, as compared to 44% for Philly proper.
I don't think you're understanding my point.
We're not talking normal distributions. We're talking about cherry-picking the extreme right edge of groups which on average skew 315-17 (or something close)
Shutouts are probably less surprising than one of these precincts going 280-52.
We started out with the fact that in 59 precincts, Obama got 19,605 votes and Romney got zero. 7970, 7971 and everything that flowed from them are compelling responses, to the point that I'm persuaded that it's at least possible that the vote totals are legit. "But there were three precincts in Utah where Romney SHUT OUT Obama 45-0!" is total nonsense.
It's not a matter of being disproportionately small, though -- the benefit is essentially zero, and never mind the risk: the work involved is fairly high. (Insert jokes about getting a law degree here)
Well, at least we know that logic can't get pregnant from that sort of thing.
59 of them?
Come on. Obama's decisive victory was too big for even extreme right wingers to claim stolen election. Did one person on Fox News, to pick a ship of extreme right wingers, claim this?
What they will claim - as liberals well know - is further justification for voter fraud laws.
Which is why some of the liberals here have such a hard time accepting that, gee, these results are implausible.
In all fairness, the article doesn't tell us what was on that sandwich. It might have been justified; perhaps even self-defense!
I understand that "zero" makes people's eye bug -- the same way '20 wins' or 'most hits in the 90s!' does... because we get attached to big round numbers, or, numbers like zero.
But it makes sense to me that if you win 85% of the vote... and that spread is divided into UNEVEN 1687 chunks... we ought to expect some shutouts. I would imagine we need to know more than just the "precinct" -- we probably also need to wash it through demographic filters of voting results -- but whatever...
So what are you suggesting happened?
But he was on the ballot in Kentucky, which is why we have number for him, unlike Deep South states.
Jokes aside, sorry, but for any cost/benefit analysis to make sense, the benefit has to be more than zero. Even if in this case the alleged fraudster believes the benefit is greater than zero, the benefit is still zero. Spend all of your own free time investigating in person voter fraud if you want, but the ultimate impact on real elections will be zero. Someone may really get their rocks off by surreptitiously voting twice. Still doesn't really matter. It just doesn't happen in any statistically meaningful way. And as noted before, even people who go in with the intent of doing it only to show how easy it is have a bad habit of actually getting caught.
Put another way, does in person voter fraud potentially exist? Maybe. Should anyone care about it? Almost certainly not. And you're accusing me of raping logic? That's pretty rich.
But Kentucky wasn't his home state anymore than Reagan's home state was Illinois or Obama's is Hawaii.
edit: And while he was on the ballot, there is no way of knowing if he was on the ballot everywhere in the state. He might have been on the ballot only in a few counties around Cincinnati.
It took me five minutes to find that 37 precincts in Kansas recorded 0 votes for Obama in 2008. 37!
Murdered over facebook
Murdered over cheetos
Murdered over jordans
Murdered over bike
Killed over world of warcraft
Killed over a fart
Killed over a video game
Killed over film
Whatever happened to a good old fashioned murder of a spurned lover?
Show me a voter fraud law that would have stopped this from happening, if it really happened?
Voter Id? That wouldn't have helped anyone to vote Romney. In fact, it might have even stopped someone from voting Romney by mistake!
Culling voter rolls based on crappy criteria? That wouldn't have helped anyone to vote for Romney. In fact, it might have even stopped someone from voting Romney by mistake!
So what voter fraud law would actually have stopped this "engineered" 59-district shutout?
FWIW, if there's a 95% chance of each individual vote going to Obama, you'd expect Romney to get 52 or more votes 0.0000000000003% of the time (EDIT: I'm not entirely sure I got the number of zeros correct, but you get the point). The expected median result at 95% for Obama would be about 315-17. At 99% the median is about 329-3.
These medians are instructive. I think that if you take them and then factor in human nature, a bunch of shutouts doesn't seem especially unlikely.
What is the normal number of precinct shutouts in any given election?
Ahhhh-haaaahhhh!
Clearly, Kansas is a bastion of voter fraud... since this means Obama's 2008 win would have been larger and as such, he'd have had a larger mandate - he'd have obviously carried Kansas without the Republican machine fraud - the only fair thing to do is waive the 22nd amendment.
Look. I was talking about the possibility of systemic fraud quite some time ago. If you're going to steal an election that's the way to go.
So sure, have verification standards at the level required of a video poker machine. Make sure a true audit trail is possible.
But this has absolutely zip to do with voter ID based voter fraud laws. And anybody who brings up voter ID in the context of these discussions is an absolute moron.
Oh, absolutely. My numbers are what would happen if every voter went into the booth and determined his or her vote by rolling a 100-sided die and comparing the result against a percentage table. That's obviously not how people vote. (Though for some people it would probably represent an improvement.)
HawaiiKenya.FTFY.
Liberals don't know that petitions to secede were filed in 2004.
Apparently CONGRESS kept Obama from closing Gitmo. Congress probably held a gun to his head and made him uphold Bush's detention policies too.
Second question: what kind of fraud would lead to zero votes? Why counting fraud, where the ballots were counted incorrectly. So the hypothetical guy in Philly who voted for Romney and had his vote removed or repurposed in the counting. Which of course none of the Voter ID laws would prevent at all.
EDIT: And because my sister called me and delayed my post I owe cokes. Drat.
Did this not happen?
I probably knew at the time and made fun of it then. If it happens again in 2016 I'll probably make fun of it (and have forgotton the previous instances).
My memory is that terrible.
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