The New York Times

Tuesday, November 14, 2000

Go With Fuzzy Logic

By STEVEN JOHNSON

In the first couple of days after Election Day, as lawyers and reporters swarmed around the unlikely constituency for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach, Fla., it looked as if the 2000 election would be the first to be decided by bad graphic design. Then the phrase "hanging chad" entered the debate, and the question was whose supporters were more likely to succeed at punching a hole through a card. Now, in the fight over recounting ballots by hand, the issue turns out to be whether perceptual and analytic skills of machines are better than those of humans - a strangely fitting theme for the first election of the 21st century.

Republicans argue that manual recounts of punch card ballots - the kind used in Palm Beach and some (but not all) other Florida counties - call on election officials to "divine the will" or "read the mind" of the voter, while machines are objective. Democrats, arguing for trust in human judgment, are all for the manual counts.

It is an interesting coincidence, given the "fuzzy math" insults in the campaign, that deciding whom to trust here - human or machine - turns on the mathematical and scientific concept of fuzzy logic. Humans are extremely talented at making accurate assessments of fuzzy questions like whether a voter punctured a card even when some material is left hanging - the so-called chad. A chad may hang in various configurations, but because human intelligence is more nuanced than that of a machine - particularly an out-of-date punch card reader - a human observer will instantly see that it was the intent of the voter to punch a hole. In the crude, world of the punch card reading machine, either the chad is fully removed (so that light can shine through the hole in a particular way the machine can recognize), or the vote doesn't count. More advanced machinery might be able to make more nuanced assessments, using fuzzy logic, but of course more advanced machinery would do away with punch cards.

It is an inherent bias in these punch card machines that is really at the heart of this court battle.

When James Baker, the Republican former secretary of state, argued that "machines are neither Republicans nor Democrats and therefore can never be consciously or even unconsciously biased," he pointed to the obvious: machines don't have political views. But punch card systems are notoriously likely to undercount votes - far more likely to do so than are the other voting mechanisms used in Florida.

Since the voters who make incomplete punches are likely to be spread randomly over the political spectrum, rescuing their votes and adding them to the totals in any particular county is likely to deliver more votes to the candidate who is more popular there than to his rival. A machine that undercounts votes has a Republican bias in a predominantly Democratic county and a Democratic bias in a predominantly Republican county.

With the two candidates separated by only a few hundred votes statewide, the infographic that might foretell the outcome of this election is a map of punch-card voting versus other voting mechanisms in the counties of Florida. From the intensity of one side's objection to the manual recount and the other side's interest in pursuing it, one might logically wonder if the campaign officials on both sides are carrying that map in their heads.

Steven Johnson is co-founder of Feedmag.com and author of "Interface Culture."