Maybe you missed the words, “Bush didn’t have his fingerprints on that,” followed by a ‘but’ and a mention of other, non-SCOTUS things, that he DID have something to do with.
I am by no means a fan of Bush, or Gore for that matter, but the idea that the election was stolen, short of actually showing voter fraud just stinks of being a sore loser to me. To me, looking back at it now, and calling it stolen is like watching a football game that’s played really close, and comes down to a call on the final play that really could have gone either way. Even watching instant replay, it’s iffy to tell how it should be called, and fans of both teams are certain it should be called their way.
As another said upthread, the actual difference in votes between the two was well within the margin of error for the types of ballots used and methods of counting. As it is, the recount didn’t finish, Gore loses, and I think his supporters have a legitimate gripe with not getting a recount. However, if the recount had continued as it was and Gore had won, I also think Bush’s supporters would have had a legitimate gripe that the recount only occured in counties that likely benefitted Gore and not all of the counties.
Yes, there were some legal things involved, but I don’t think there’s really a fair way that could have been done either. No matter how the judicial system ruled, one side would have seen it as a decision for the other. Imagine if the Supreme Court had ruled to allow just that recount to happen, Gore edges out push by a hundred votes or whatever. The whole thing would still be controversial but it would have been the Republicans upset and crying fowl instead.
Really, I think the only fair way to have handled it would have been a statewide recount, but I’m not sure how practical that actually would have been. Considering how hectic it was just with a few counties looking at recounts, I can’t imagine how it would have worked across the whole state. And even if it had, would the loser not still have felt robbed?
So you’re saying that Florida needs citizens of higher quality with respect to punching holes in paper?
Whatever. But I’ve always been of the view that the citizenry is what it is, and arguments dependent on the notion that the people have failed to live up to one’s standards are inherently of little value.
“There’s no real evidence” in support of a claim nobody’s making.
As Woody Guthrie sang many years ago: “Some will rob you with a six-gun, and some with a fountain pen.” Robbing with a six-gun is always a criminal act. Robbing with a fountain pen, not always.
I think the point is that elderly voters are going to have a harder time punching a paper ballot than the rest of us. Put 30 years plus Parkinson’s on any of us and we’d be challenged putting that small stylus in the right hole and pushing hard enough to punch out the chad.
If I don’t ensure that the chads I punch are completely removed as per instructions in the voting booth, then I can’t complain is my vote is not counted correctly. That’s not a standard - that’s following directions.
And you can’t argue can canvassing board/recount observers interpretation of dimpled chads, hanging chads and swinging chads meaning a intention to vote depended a lot on the person’s political party.
It should be noted that the USSC was 7-2 on the question of whether to overturn the FLSC, but 5-4 on the question of whether to stop the recounts. It wasn’t just a party-line vote, to the extent that any Supreme Court decision can be so characterized.
No, it’s both. You’re setting up being able to fully comply with the instructions as a standard.
And it’s silly to argue over whether it was a reasonable standard by arguing over the details of being able to punch that perforated circle loose with a stylus. I, having never encountered such a ballot, have no idea how easily or with what difficulty the holes punched out, or whether you could pick the ballot up, reach around, and pull off those infamous ‘hanging chads.’ Unless you can set up a replica Florida 2000 voting booth, with actual 2000-quality paper ballots for us to punch, that we could somehow all go to, we wouldn’t even be able to be sure we were talking about the same thing.
The thing that made the decision pretty lousy was basically that the decision said “we are going to decide this way NOW but this should not set a precedent for anything else!” It was weaselly and awful, IMHO.
Also, allowing the recount to continue in Gore-favorable counties and getting him a win, I don’t think would have “stunk” as bad as Bush barely winning because Gore had won the popular vote (although rather narrowly, decisively), and a lot of people are fans of that, in general. Sure, a number of republicans would complain that Gore had stolen the election by choosing counties that favored him, and that would be a fair criticism. However, overall, the public at large probably would have been more accepting of the result because the electoral college victor would also be the popular vote victor.
Personally, I don’t have any problem with the fact that Bush won, but I think it did help modernize a lot of voting equipment and such so maybe in the end it helped push toward solving that problem. I do think the state republican party did everything they could to make sure Bush won, but I don’t think he stole the election in any meaningful sense. As I said before, at the level that election came down to, it’s all about playing the game and rules-lawyering everything you can to your benefit. I don’t have any problem with the GOP or the democratic party doing whatever they can to try to get their candidate elected.
In a perfect world, every vote cast would be a valid vote, there would be no question of voter intent, and Gore would have easily won Florida. But we don’t live in a perfect world and of all the valid votes, it’s just as likely that Bush won Florida as Gore did (perhaps a bit more likely since Bush was in the lead but I wasn’t following the statistics that closely so I’m not sure how an extended recount was likely to go).
I’m not bitter about Gore losing the election though. As others said, he could have won one of any other state that he lost and been fine. That he needed Florida was sad, honestly.
Also, I don’t hate Nader and I think the Nader hate is ridiculous as well.
Please give us a better reason than “I’m a conservative and I don’t like liberal sites” for disregarding the links.
The link you DO accept makes it abundantly clear that Jeb Bush’s state government went out of its way to maximize false positives in the effort to scrub its voter rolls.
Rand Paul? Is that you?
Hm. Never heard Salon called that before. Not even around here.
You must’ve clicked the wrong link; the one I posted goes to SourceWatch.
There’s no evidence of that. The RNC primarily directs money to elections in different States, it’s your claim they somehow manipulated both the vote in Florida and the Supreme Court? Through what mechanism, and what evidence do you have to support this claim?
The biggest thing I drew from the Florida election was that ballots should be objectively measured and not subjectively. The moment you’re objectively determining what was marked on a ballot you run into a problem with a small number of interpreters are trying to discern the will of the electorate. Ballots do not, and in many other states were not, setup in a way in which they could so easily be marked in a way that leaves the result in question.
Even the old school paper ballots I voted on in my first election, that just said “place an X through the box next to the candidate you want” are far superior. The boxes were right next to the candidate’s names and no others, and the instructions clearly say: mark two boxes in any way–your vote doesn’t count, mark one box clearly with an X. That leaves some potential for subjectivity, but is still better by far than the butterfly ballots. Electronic ballots are better still as long as they are constructed properly.
So you call something he didn’t actually have anything to do with and probably didn’t affect the outcome of the election Bush stealing the election? That makes a lot of sense.
Please, I’d be hard pressed to think of a more blatantly leftist news outlet in the mainstream internet press. It’s basically the DailyKos with better writing.
You mean the site with a prominent header ragging on ALEC and “exposing” them? Yes, sounds very non-partisan and reliable.
I agree with that, with two caveats:
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I am convinced more legal voters attempted to vote for Gore that election day in Florida. That really sucks.
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I don’t think Bush got ‘lucky.’ It was a statistical tie, as stated. I think Florida should have refused to send electors to Washington on December 7, in which case the House of Representatives votes, and Bush wins. That’s the fairest way that passes constitutional muster I can think of. In fact, if Florida has no proviso to *not *send electors, Bush himself could have requested that the electors just vote ‘present’ or something, because he didn’t want the process to leave people bitter and distrustful of the government.
Don’t ever do that again.
Non-partisan is one thing and reliable is quite another. SourceWatch is at any rate more reliable than Accuracy in Media, Breitbart, Fox News, The Washington Times, any of the Murdoch outlets . . .
Granted and in fairness, RationalWiki (not a RW source by any means) has its own criticisms of SourceWatch:
Center for Media and Democracy.
Well, somebody’s gotta do that.
Is this a whoosh? In what universe would this be considered non-partisan?