A Freedom of Information Recount?

Great Debates
41

It seems to me that many of the democratic supporters on this board are asserting that the general populace of Florida intended to vote for Gore but through some unfortunate (to the Democrats anyway) circumstances their votes weren’t counted (double punched ballots, dimpled chads, etc.).

To all of this I say… “So what?”. If under the law it is not permissible to judge the intent of the voter who accidentally voted for 2 candidates and it is also not legal to count votes with dimpled chads what exactly do you people propose? Rewrite the law after the election? Automatically assume that those votes should go to Gore despite the fact that the law says they shouldn’t count?

Let’s say that the following are facts for our purposes…

  1. 10000 people who intended to vote for Gore accidentally double punched their votes thereby disqualifying them.

  2. Because those votes were disqualified Bush wins the state and by extension the presidency.

So, assuming that these are facts what are the Democrats proposed solutions? It seems to me that they boil down to to these:

  1. The ballot counters assume the 10,000 mispunched votes are for Gore and award them to him.

  2. Revote in those counties where the 10,000 ballots were disqualified due to double punched ballots.

So which one is it? Or if it’s neither of the above two solutions what IS the preferred solution? (assuming above “hypothetical” facts)

Grim_Beaker

42

Tejota and Stoidela:

If you claim that Gore won the popular vote then you must claim that Bush won the Florida vote. There were approximately 2,000,000 votes tossed out in the US. That’s nearly 10 times the number of votets separating Gore and Bush. You can’t have it both ways.

43

DSYoung, Beaker, trade Please note that I said “So the legal result of this contest is going to be different than what the people wanted.”

I recognise that there are no solutions to the mistakes that will legally give the election to Gore.

I also recognise that Bush has done nothing illegal in his bid to swing the election his way in Florida. (I’m assuming that he had nothing to do with Seminole & Martin)

Also, keep in mind what thread we are in here. A ‘freedom of information recount’ would not be bound by a legal interpretation of the ballots, It could use statistical methods and direct observations to determine the will of the people more accurately than the counts we have had so far.

Once that is done, I don’t think that the result will be within the statistical margin of error at all. This race is ‘too close to call’ ONLY because of a series of large scale errors (mostly double votes) That harmed Gore far more than Bush. (I find the arguments RTFirefly’s thread on error vs. bias compelling).

In fact, I have yet to see a SINGLE instance of non-trival votor error that resulted in a bias for Bush, based on the evidence we currently have there is simply no basis for Milo’s claim that the errors even out over the population.

At this point I believe that Bush will be president. I also believe that he is president only by accident and that the claim that he ‘Won’ the election suggests a definition of ‘Win’ that I wouldn’t normally use.

Yes he gets the prize, yes he will win it legally. But no, he won’t win it honestly.

tj

44

No both ways about it. Unless there is evidence that the 2,000,000 tossed ballots weren’t split 50/50 Bush/Gore then there is no reason to believe that they would affect the outcome.

Got any evidence of that?

Whereas in Florida, we have quite a bit of evidence to show that far more democrat ballots were tossed than republican ones. (Once again, I refer you to RTFirefly’s thread on Error vs. Bias).

tj

45

Milosarrian: Glad to help! Clearly, some form of outreach for the humor impaired is called for. There are still persons who believe that rendering the VP’s name as “algore” is a hoot! Scanning with the Chucklemeter gives a reading of .03, which, in all fairness, is Limburgers personal best.

As my personal hero, Mark Twain, once pointed out, humor is about the only way you can preach without being tedious. As politics is ultimately based on morality, one ends up preaching.

“Forces of Darkness” Intended as humorous, but based on a sincere moral stance, compassion over power, humanity over money, freedom over force, love above law.

I remain a sincere admirer of Barry Goldwater, worked for his campaign in 64 (when LBJ was the Peace Candidate, irony of irony) Would Barry have accepted an Electoral College win if the popular vote had gone against him? I think not.

No one who has lived through Nixon can really be much afeared of Bush. “Landslide” George would never have sabotaged peace negotiations in order to win an election. Nixon was evil, George the Lesser is merely odious. Dick Cheney is no Spiro Agnew, praise be to Allah.

Comfort the afflicted, afflict the comfortable.

Memo to Moderator: You are entirely correct, Your Excellency, I humbly beseech your pardon, and only hasten to point out that he started it!! Did too!

And finally, is it possible to unhijack? I really, really, honest-to-Big Bird wanted to hear about the possibility of an after the fact recount just so we know Thats all! I have heard that Florida has a Sunshine Law (but of course!) that would indicate that that would be the case, but can the Incorrect Ones (better?) do anything to stop it? 'Cause if they can, they will.

46

Military ballots.

I’m sorry…what was the dishonesty again?

47

:rolleyes: Ok I asked for that. Yes, this does meet my criteria of a single instance. Although I would have to say the these battots have been counted for the most part.
But even if we assume that there should count votor intent and not have any legal conditions met, and ALL of these ballots were for Bush, that is still only about 5000 of them across the state. That’s insignificant compared to Palm Beach, OR to Duval double punches, not to mention comparing that to the two of them togeher.

My contention stands, there errors in this race in Florida DID NOT even out.

How about “machine counts are more accurate than hand counts”, for a start. It turns out the Bush’s witness
on punch card machines in the contest trial was forced to admit on the stand that a hand count was more accurate.

What’s even more telling here, is the fact that he was FORCED to admit it, he didnt’ intend to tell the truth until the prosecution caught him saying things exactly the opposite of a patent application that he had filed.

But really, that’s a hijack. You know what I meant. An HONEST win is one where the will of the people is accurately reflected by who takes prize.

tj

48

The dishonesty is the few publicised errors. Considering Tejotas assertion that errors fall 50/50 there were errors like the one at palm beach florida, they just werent publicised because Bush had no reason to make a arguement of them.

49

Cite please. Easy enough to make these claims. Could it be that you havn’t tried to back this up because you can’t?

tj

50

With all due respect…

He did say the errors were not publicized:)

51

  1. It’s only reasonable to assume that the errors we don’t know anything about were split 50-50. If you flip a coin twice, and the first flip is heads, knowing that coin flips tend to fall 50-50 doesn’t tell you that the next flip is gonna be tails; the odds are still 50-50.

  2. Gore’s current lead in the popular vote is 337,000 votes. To overcome that, the remaining 2M uncounted votes would have to favor Bush over Gore by that margin, or by about 17%.

  3. If you’re flipping coins, the mathematical expectation of the number of heads in 2 million flips is of course 1 million. The standard deviation? 707.

What we have here is a binomial experiment, which (for more than 30 trials, let alone 2 million) follows the normal distribution very closely. In the normal distribution, results fall within 2 standard deviations of expectation 95% of the time; within 3 s.d.'s 99.7% of the time, and within 6 s.d.'s 99.9999% of the time.

What Bush would need to win the popular vote, based on a 50-50 likelihood of winning each of those 2 million votes, is a result 238 standard deviations above expectation. That isn’t infinitely improbable, but it might as well be.
In short, absent any factor causing a pretty fair tilt toward Bush among those uncounted ballots, Bush doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning the popular vote by counting those uncounted ballots. And given that they’re presumably scattered nationwide, you’d probably need a bunch of separate factors causing Bush to be overrepresented among those uncounted votes. And that possibility, too, stretches the credibility a bit.

52

I’ll accept that it’s unlikely that Bush would get the popular vote even were we to get an accurate count of all the rest 2 million some odd disqualified ballots…

However, I say this is beside the point. The question isn’t “Who wins the popular vote of the people?” and the question isn’t “Who is being dishonest with their motives?”… the question is “Who won according to the law?”.

So to repeat a piece of my previous post in this topic…

So which is it?

Grim_Beaker

53

My preferred solution would be #1, but of course that’s just wacky and could never happen. (although I do recall early along hearing whispers of some provision for statistically analyizing the votes and doing something very similar. Maybe that was just in my dreams.) # 2 might be closer to doable, but still…nah.

So. we are left with what has actually occurred:

Knowing that he really did win, or should have without the screwups, Al went looking for the votes he needed to get the result that the Florida voters intended. He knew, as we all now know, that the vote tallys are imperfect at best, and that a close examination of the ballots stood a good chance of giving him what was rightfully his to begin with.

And that’s the bottom line. That is why this whole thing has been so damn frustrating. It isn’t like he really did lose. It isn’t like a majority ('scuse, a plurality) voted for Bush and he’s looking for a way to overturn that. More people went to the polls and voted for Gore than for Bush. There is no question of that, both in Florida AND in the nation. It is completely understandable that he would fight like hell to get every remaining uncounted vote he could, don’t you think?

stoid

54

Stoidela, I think you’ve hit it on the nose. The situations that deprived Gore of genuinely large numbers of votes, mostly don’t admit to a acceptable remedies. So Gore went after the hand recounts, and I don’t blame him for seeking every last possible vote that way.

The one big thing that allows a relatively easy remedy is the Duval County two-page presidential ballot, where the instructions apparently said to vote on each page. If a vote was cast for either Bush or Gore on page 1, and the voter also voted for a minor presidential candidate on page 2, those disqualified votes could be tallied for Bush or Gore, whichever they voted for on page 1. I’d be satisfied if they did just that, and I think one might have a chance of persuading a judge that that was a reasonable remedy.

I don’t expect anybody’s listening, but I’ll make the point one more time that, while there were few remedies to this problem available through the courts, a quick and easy remedy was in the hands of one man: George W. Bush. He was free to recognize the nature of the situation at any time, and offer his concession. (Or, at the very least, he could have acceded to the hand counts, and accepted the result if it went against him.)

IMO, Bush must bear his share of the moral burden for thwarting the will of the people of Florida, and the nation, in this election.

55

We’re not flipping coins man, we’re counting votes.
Your statistics lesson is all nice and tidy, but you have created it in a sterile vacuum. Once you throw a little reality, the example falls apart.

First flaw…

The 4 million or so uncounted absentee ballots in the country. I’m not talking about ones that got thrown out, I’m talking about all the states that did not count them because they would not have effected the outcome of the individual states.

Second Flaw…

You assume an even distribution of errors. Hell, the errors may be skewed agaisnt the democrats all over the country. I don’t know, but neither do you.

Third Flaw…

Assuming errors are not really fraud. In an attempt to be objective, I guess it is possible that either party cheated by screwing with the ballots of the other party. This would tend to skew the second flaw even more.
The point is, our country is not set up for an election this close. we need to revamp the system, and include measures to reduce fraud as well as increase accuracy.

56

You guys are simply amazing.

The only way for Bush to be a good winner would be to roll over and hand the election to the loser?

And will you guys cut this “Will of the People” garbage out? Half the country could care less, one quarter of the country feels one way and the other quarter feels completely different. Neither side gets some sort of “Will of the People” mantle to wear around for the next 4 years.

57

Everything I’ve cited is right out of the papers. If the press is so liberal, why aren’t they running headlines demanding that Bush concede? And why isn’t Dan Rather calling for him to do so on the network news?

I have no doubt that the reporters and editors vote rather heavily in favor of Democrats. But my point is, their attempt to report the news objectively, while inevitably producing something less than precise objectivity, still means a great deal. And this shows just how much.

58

Sad to say, but wasn’t that what Florida attempted to do with the massive regulations about absentee ballots and how to request them etc. etc. etc.?

and, herein we have yet another issue of well, the rule of law said that the ballot requests should be denied if they were improperly filled out, and yet several thousand were allowed to be ‘fixed’ (and in the case in Martin Co, were allowed to be removed from the office) by persons not related to the voters, all of which was specifically against the law, and the democratic ballot requests were ** not** afforded the same treatment, and yet, again, we’re told “gee, the people that did it should be punished, but there’s no remedy for how the vote went”.

It will be interesting to see if felony charges arise out of this (and how ironic- if found guilty, they won’t be able to vote in Florida again).

59

I know. There’s this thing called an analogy.

Do you have a cite on that? My understanding has always been that they don’t stop counting the votes, simply because the issue is settled; they may come in late, but they get added to the official tallies. Which state, or states, have said, “We have absentee ballots, but we’re not going to count them because they wouldn’t affect the outcome” ?

I don’t know, but absent any concrete reason to suspect that it’s true, the odds are extremely long against that being the case. There are lots of things like this that could in theory happen, but never do, because the odds are just too high. Absent a clear cause to the contrary, fifty-fifty is the null hypothesis; the obligation is on the person who would say otherwise to justify his assertion.

That would be fine if you had evidence of fraud. But you’ve got to provide it, just as you’ve got to provide evidence for your hypothesis that the uncounted votes nationally were skewed by some other factor, the way we’ve provided evidence of the FL vote being skewed.

No argument on that, at least. :slight_smile:

60

New York and Califonia are two that I know for sure about. I will see if I can dig up a cite. It is not my understanding that this is some strange aberation of this election, I think this is standard policy.

Sheeeeesh.

You are the one running around screaming that ALL the errors have been anti-Gore. I would think of all the people around here who would agree that the errors are not evenly distributed, you would be the first.

Aren’t you guys claiming fraud in Seminole county?

If you want to hold on to your coin flipping hypothesis that is fine by me, but I think that if there is ONE obvious thing to come out of this election, it is that the election is FULL OF irregularities.