Am I the only one enjoying this?

All over the board, on the sidewalk, and in the media I see people saying they just want it all to be over. Why? This is the most interesting election we’ve had in years! It’s like sudden death overtime, how can we change the channel before we see how it ends?

What’s more, everyone is talking about how this is going to “tear the country apart”. Why? Personally, I think it’s about time the ant farm was given a good shaking. We’ve got all these obscure laws and practices lurking around in the murky pits of our government that are only now seeing the light of day. Most people didn’t even know what an electoral college was until now. We can’t do something about it until we know it’s there. The dynamite has been tossed into the water, and now all of the fishies are floating to the top. Get the nets out, boys. It’s time to clean this filthy puddle we call a government.

I’d be enjoying it even more if I cared less about the outcome.

And I am completely with you in being stumped by the idea of the country being torn apart. The country is just dandy and will remain so for quite some time. The only people who really think this needs to be settled now are Bush supporters.

stoid

Yep! We already have a built-in grace period for stuff like this to be worked out, until mid-January, so why not make sure?

I think it’s fascinating to watch everybody spin and squirm and also the reactions of all those confused furriners are so cute :smiley:

Granted, I might get sick of more than a couple more weeks of this…

I’m sick of it, because it seems to be bringing out the worst in a lot of people. Even here people seem to be a little nastier than usual in some of these threads. I’m sick of all these sweeping generalizations - “Democrats are this”, “Republicans are that.” The hyperbole is a bit much.

So I mostly ignore it and haven’t gotten involved in the discussions. I don’t like Bush or Gore, though I consider Gore a lesser evil.

I’ll tell you what I enjoy - having 118 teenagers actually interested and participating in their social studies classes! I just wish I could tell them how it’s going to work out…

While I’m not actually enjoying this, I am strangely captivated by it. Someone on MSNBC called this “political pornography.” A very apt description, I think.

I’ve voted in every presidential election since I’ve been old enough, but I never really thought my vote counted for all that much, seeing as how the electoral college kinda has the final say on the matter. Now that this bizarre thing has occurred, I’m beginning to see that my vote counts for one hell of a lot more than I ever imagined.

On election day, I was pulling for my candidate. But as time passes, I find myself pulling for a correct count. If my candidate wins, fine. If not, fine. Just so long as the count is correct. While neither candidate really ever made me totally hot for him, I don’t think either of them totally suck. I think that either one of them could probably do an adequate job of running the country.

Maybe we should just go back to the old days and let the winner be president, and the loser be vice-president. After the events of the week, that would be pretty entertaining!

What you guys are missing is that there can be no such thing as a correct count in this situation. No other county in the U.S. hand-counted their punch card votes. Some Republican, some Democrat. Other areas had other voter irregularities, some Republican, some Democrat.

Let’s turn this into a scientific exercise, and get away from the partisan stuff. Let’s say the election was an experiment. We would measure the results, and then say, “X percent of the people voted Republican, with a margin of error of y%”. That’s the best we can do. In the past, the percentages were always greater than the margin of error, so it was a non-issue.

So what happens when your result falls within the margin of error? You have a null result. The ‘signal’ is hidden in noise. In this election, both the popular vote and the electoral college votes are overshadowed by election ‘noise’.

What the Gore camp is taking advantage of is the fact that the precincts currently in the limelight are heavily Democratic. So he’s trying to get the vote counted there in a different way, hoping that it will win him the election.

But even if it does, the results are STILL in the range of ‘noise’, and it would be no more correct to state that Gore represents the will of the people as it would Bush.

So somewhere along the way you have to make an arbitrary decision to stop. The Bush people are saying that the right time to stop is after a second machine count to verify that their are no gross irregularities. The Gore people are saying, “But wait! This particular state is really, really close, and we’re sitting in an area full of Democrats! Let’s pick over it and see if we can’t cough up enough votes to make US technically the winner.”

If this were science and not an election, the results would just be deemed inconclusive. But a good scientist would NEVER just pull out a selected area that supports the conclusion he wanted in the first place and try to be more ‘accurate’ in interpreting just that one piece. That biases the result.

In this case, calling the election ‘inconclusive’ is not an option. Someone has to be president. Since the will of the people is unknown (and will remain that way no matter how many recounts there are in Florida), the choice boils down to political manoevering, which both camps are engaged in, and which is not very democratic.

If you study the recent field of “Chaos Theory”, you’ll find underneath everything that appears orderly and stable, there is chaos. All you have to do is scratch the surface.

For years we thought we had this nice clean can that represented the result of our “democratically held elections”. Well, guess what. We just opened this nice cleancan – and inside, it is full of worms.

Yep. It is fun to watch Jeanie coming out of the bottle.

No place else showed any need to. No other state called Gore to tell him not to concede, the count was too close to call. No other state was so close (yet) that it triggered an automatic recount. No other state ran a recount that showed that certain counties’ counts were hugely off the first count.

There is a REASON this happened. Gore didn’t create the situation himself.

That’s fine, if one candidate is millions of votes ahead of the other…even tens of thousands. But when the split is a couple hundred? Let’s strive for accuracy, shall we?

Given that Gore continues to hold a pretty decent lead in the popular vote, I disagree.

Versus what other kind of winner? (By the way, for all your attempts to make your post sound reasoned and impartial, look at this paragraph again and see how you portrayed the Bush and Gore camps. )

And no one did that here. There was an area that showed alot more errors than any other, due to this area’s voting system. That it was Democratic was a happy accident.
stoid

Happy accident… meaning that they are taking the opportunity to skew the votes in their favor?:slight_smile:

Stoidela, you’re missing the point - lots of other areas use punch cards, and lots of other areas use the butterfly ballot. And there are plenty of areas that had FAR more spoiled ballots than Palm Beach county.

As you say, it was a ‘happy accident’ that Palm Beach happens to be heavily Democratic. So you’re suggesting that rather than ‘noise’ deciding the election, it should be decided by a ‘happy accident’? In which way is this more Democratic?

If it had accidentally been a Republican area and Gore had a slight lead, would you still insist on accuracy?

What’s interesting about this situation is how it has polarized the two political camps. There is NO ‘correct’ answer here. There is absolutely no way to know the true will of the people. The election was a wash. The result was completely irrelevant. This gives both sides a lot of ‘wiggle room’ for partisan bickering over the ‘real’ result.

What is surprising is how many people are unwilling to be truthful about this. I’ve heard more phony justifications for each side’s actions than I could have imagined. Why can’t you just say, “Well hell, this election wound up in loophole-land, so I’ll do everything in my power to get my guy into office.”

Another thing that I’m finding rather interesting is the fact that whenever the GWB camp is asked whether or not GWB would do what Gore is doing if the situation were reversed, they respond with something like “Well, Nixon didn’t press for a recount, and neither did Ford.” Am I supposed to take that to mean that GWB would concede? Because if that’s what they’re trying to get me to believe, they’re failing. GWB would be a fool to just let it ride.

I personally do not blame the Democrats for pressing for as accurate a count as possible (Sam Stone might be right on that–they might not be able to get it exactly, perfectly correct, but they can get close). If the situation were reversed, and the Republicans wanted these recounts, I wouldn’t blame them, either. This is just too close to let it go without question.

We have the punch ballots here where I vote. I’ll tell you what–come next election, I’m going to make damn sure there’s no little hangy things on my ballot before I give it back. And I imagine every other voter here will be doing the same thing.

I have not heard that to be true. Assuming it is…Bush and co. saw the writing on the wall. Better they should attempt to THWART the lawful recounts, or request their own? Which is better? Which is more legit?

Of course, I am extremely partisan. I would not ACTIVELY INSIST upon anything that would interfere with winning. On the other hand, I would support the legitimacy of any requested recount. I would not disagree with it, I would not fight it, I would not try to portray it as wrong, and I would be honest enough to admit that if positions were reversed, I’d be doing the same thing. Can’t say that about too many on the other side these days.

You are not being honest. Or shall I say, you are not seeing hte situation honestly. They are not both exploiting loopholes. The actions taken on either side have not been equal. Bush is playing dirty, Bush is trying to make NEW rules that he likes better than the existing ones. You may say that Gore is exploiting the rules, and you’d be right. (There is a law of some kind backing every single aspect of this whole recount situation, down to the tiniest detail.) But Bush is trying to BREAK them.

Hmmm… a politician who knows how to use the system to his advantage, legally, or a politician that wants to cheat the law entirely? I’ll take the guy that works with the system, thanks very much.

stoid

PS: And Bush’s desire to change the rules mid-stream is even more obnoxious given that his first move, after spending a campaign telling us how he wants to let the STATES decide how to do things, is to run to the FEDERAL gov’t to get them to tell the state of Florida not to follow their own laws. “DADDY!! MAKE THEM PLAY THE GAME MY WAY!”

Man, can’t you even acknowledge that in this, at least, bush is being a whiny, hypocritical asshole? Jesus…it’s SO fucking plain! The denial around here is mind-boggling!

Persephone, I have a feeling that the punch ballot system is toast after this, don’t you? (We also have that system here in LA).

Coincidentally, right after I voted, I was sem-joking with the election workers about the accuracy of the ballots. I asked them if they were sure that the hole I punched would be credited properly for Gore. OOOOoooooeeeeoooo! (That is the sound of something eerie and mysterious and spooky. Is there a more accpted way of expressing that in print?)

Well, I don’t think I would call it “a happy accident”…If all these problems hadn’t happened in a heavily Democratic area, Gore probably would have won on the election in Florida outright the first time around!

[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by jshore *
**

Good point!

I think it’s great fun myself. We are living through a great moment in history. A potential Constitutional crisis. A test of our system.

I agree that the only ones in a rush to get it resolved are the Bush people. Let’s relax, go through the legal process (which is all Gore is doing) and see how things come out.

In the meantime, what a show!

379 ballots in Bernalillo County, New Mexico were hand counted on Friday and/or Saturday. The results flipped New Mexico: Bush is now ahead by 4 votes.

The Bush campaign did not object to those hand counts. Nor did they object to the hand counts Seminole County, Florida, which gave Bush a net gain of 98 votes. (Nor do I object :slight_smile: )
Source: NYT, Nov 12, 2000; 2 articles.

Sam says:

Yup. Particularly in New Mexico, if the results turn on 4 votes.

Not entirely arbitrary. It should be within the framework of existing law. I agree that the election is basically a tie. But I would think that having possibility of a recount could conceivably lower the variance of our estimates. The bias problem is addressed by allowing both sides to invoke a hand count, which is indeed what has happened. My limited understanding of election law indicates that recounts don’t typically repeat indefinitely.

We can’t expect 100% accuracy. We can hope for a reasonably fair tabulation process, which is what we’re getting, IMO. (We can dream of electoral reforms, after all this is resolved).

Patience, gang. It will all be resolved by January 21st (I expect).

Howard Baker: “Eventually somebody is going to be a hero and somebody’s going to be president. Not necessarily the same person.”

Stoid the reason why Bush doesen’t request a handcount is because he can’t. I am assuming he is trying to test wether or not he can get a recount with the legalities.

While I DO want to know who is going to be the next president (Better be Gore, Dammit!), I do find this FASCINATING. I’m a history major, and as corny as this sounds, I KNOW I’ll be telling my kids and grandkids about this.

However, I can’t wait to see what happens next…