Back in 2012, I had a piece running in Slate on the Hunter case (which I talked about further in The Voting Wars), in which voters were disenfranchised because of poll worker error. Among the errors—a poll worker who could not tell that number 798 was an even number and sent the voter to the odd-numbered precinct. The piece inspired UW Madison psychology professor Gary Lupyan to conduct some experiments testing people’s ability to distinguish odd and even numbers, in the service of making a larger point about the sorts of things that are easy versus difficult to compute by biological computational systems as distinct from digital computers. The results are pretty depressing, including the fact that a “sizable minority” of people believe the number 400 is more even [corrected!] than the number 798!
Don’t Have Faith in Poll Workers, Or Anyone Else for That Matter, To Distinguish Odd from Even Numbers | Election Law Blog
