Yesterday's Seattle Post-Intelligencer has a delightful front-page story about psychological research on young children and their imaginary playmates.
a 7-year-old boy, described his pal "Skateboard Guy" as an invisible 11-year-old who lived in his pocket and popped up at boring moments to do tricks on his skateboard.It turns out that this is a very common phenomenon. This also brings back fond memories. At age three I had an imaginary playmate named "Parsley" whose house was located in a corner of our dining room.
The researcher has found that imaginary playmates persist longer than once realized:
"I'm beginning to think it never goes away," said Marjorie Taylor, head of psychology at the University of Oregon and a leading researcher on children's pretend play. "What I think is it morphs into a different form."Even some adults who are in the news lately seem to have imaginary playmates.
For example, Paul Berendt imagines that the 15,000 illegal, spoiled or otherwise disqualified ballots are somehow associated with 15,000 imaginary legal voters who cast valid votes for his candidate. Christine Gregoire imagines that an imaginary previous Attorney General was still in her office in 1996 to bless the opinion that manual recounts must not include previously rejected ballots. Gregoire also apparently imagines that there exists a growing army of imaginary voters who want her to keep fighting to the point of ridiculousness to overturn the fact that she's already lost twice.
Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at December 08, 2004 12:09 PM | Email ThisMaybe Gregoire and Berendt are playing "good cop/bad cop", but I'm wondering if the latter is actually just "delusional cop".
Count starts tomorrow in Franklin County at 10 a.m. and the auditor is hoping (keyword there) to have it done by late Friday. Maybe Saturday if necessary. The county party (fcrcc.org) is trying to round up observers to volunteer.
Posted by: Matt on December 8, 2004 01:52 PM
The Kool-Aid is strong with this one.
This bodes well for Dino. Each candidate gained close to 0.1% in total votes -- about 0.10% for Dino and 0.08% for Christine.
Voting errors (i.e. hanging or dimpled chads) are fairly evenly distributed in punchcard voting, since they are often related to dexterity and coordination. On the other hand, voting errors on optical scan ballots are more relatively more often made by Democrats, since less educated people tend to favor Democrats.
In the Florida manual recount in 2000, each candidate was gaining about 0.1% in total votes, in rough proportion to the number of votes being received by Bush and Gore in the counties being recounted.
This bodes well for Dino. He carried the punchcard counties by about 60,000 votes. 340,035 to 279,434. If each candidate adds 0.1% to their total vote in punchcard counties, then Dino will increase his net winning margin statewide by about 60 votes from this.
Posted by: Richard Pope on December 8, 2004 06:08 PMMaybe 1 out of 1000 is the error rate being introduced by a hand count. :-O
Let's hope that Benton, Clark, Franklin, Lewis, and Stevens Counties, in particular, also have a 0.1% gain for each candidate from dimpled or hanging chads, since these have the biggest margins for Rossi out of the punchcard counties.
Posted by: Richard Pope on December 8, 2004 06:27 PMbut on a side not, according to the AP, an Alaskan Group calling itself Recount Alaska 2004 is asking for a recount of the Senate race that the Rep won by more than 9,500 or 3%... you want to know why they are asking for one?
Because the AccuVote have PROVEN to be inconsistent elsewhere, and here is the real kicker, because exit polls said that the democrat was ahead...
Thats right folks, we should elect people based on EXIT polls and not real votes... after all, weren't these the same exit polls that had Kerry winning PA by 20 points and everywhere else by 5 to 10 points?
I'm surprised that the Grinch-Gregoire hasn't come and and said the same thing... after all exit polls are so much more reliable than actual votes...
Posted by: KLRMNKY on December 8, 2004 06:40 PM