195206 Resource 102972 21 21 1200938812553 1203459703384 Controlled Innumeracy and Paper Ballots

Its difficult for me to take seriously a politician who can't add.

<p>The&nbsp; very integrity of our democracy is at risk and requires emergency attention!&nbsp; At least according to Democratic congressional candidate <strong><a title="John Laesch on Paper Ballots" href="http://usalone.com/laesch/pnum779.php" target="_blank">John Laesch</a></strong>.</p><p>Anyone who knows me, or anyone that reads this blog, knows that I'm not particularly right-wing.&nbsp; But one thing that really bugs me is blatant <a title="innumeracy.com" href="http://www.innumeracy.com/" target="_blank">innumeracy</a>, especially from public figures.</p><p>Quick, what is 6+16?&nbsp; If you said &quot;22&quot;, congratulations, you've demonstrated a first-grade level of numeracy.</p><p>Now, can you spot the innumeracy in this excerpt from candidate Leasch's web site?</p><blockquote dir="ltr" style="margin-right: 0px;"><p><em>According to Holt, there are six states that have no verifiable paper trail and counties in 16 other states have the same problem. That means 20 states cannot fully verify their votes in the primaries or the November Presidential election.</em></p></blockquote><p>Unless I'm missing something, six states plus&nbsp;sixteen other states is a total of twenty-two states.&nbsp; Of course, this does not mean that our democracy is not in peril, nor does it mean that&nbsp;that paper ballots are a bad idea.&nbsp; However, it does make me considerably less willing to simply take John's word for it.</p> 10 application/xml false innumeracy John Laesch paper ballots Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.8.1.12) Gecko/20080201 Firefox/2.0.0.12 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 aseidl 68.40.167.222 false true false false true 173251 false false true false false false true 102972 blog blogsite/Seidl/web