I am – I’m complaining and bitching and grousing so that 2001-2004 is the first and final year of “President” Dubya’s administration. No more frauds in the White House!
(I’m also slightly surprised that nobody has mentioned the very questionable issue of having Dubya’s first cousin being in charge of Fox TV’s election-night results tally. Especially given that he was personally responsible for having Fox ultimately call Florida for Bush, ahead of all the other news networks, who then scrambled their own “Bush wins!” announcements to match.)
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Uh, Tranq? Ever see the thousands of Christianity and other religion threads here? Since when has something being a moot point ever stopped anyone from debating it in GD?
Granted that Squink could have phrased that more clearly, there’s no denying the party or philosophical affiliations of the 5 Justices who picked Bush as the winner.
That kind of “conclusion” can happen when you give statisticians numbers out of context. Massaging numbers without examining their source or real-world significance is what these guys DO. Now, a conclusion that there’s a .928 probability that exactly the same number of Floridians voted for Bush as for Gore is absurd on its face. The more detailed statistical explanation would probably be that the difference was within 1 sigma, but that link doesn’t discuss the author’s assumptions. One candidate had more people intending to vote for him than the other, by a margin of at least 1 vote, to a near certainty. OK?
Be very d*mn careful when accusing me of not believing the importance of Democracy. I dedicated close to half my life to supporting the Constitution, and your comment was mighty close to a personal insult. You know in which forum those belong.
No personal insult was intended by that, or by what follows. This is an attempt to discuss principles themselves.
Let me try again: Democracy at its most fundamental is the right of We the People to pick their own leaders and their own form of government. Agreed?
Now, if you agree, what follows from that principle except that it is vitally necessary to determine who wins elections to the degree reasonably humanly possible? What acceptable excuse can there be for not doing so? Is throwing up your hands and saying it’s too big a job a responsible course of action?
Florida was NOT a coin toss. There WAS a real winner. There was a concerted attempt not to find out who it was.
The supreme court did NOT stop the “normal vote counting process”. According to Florida Law, there was a finite amount of time for the votes to be recounted. That time passed,the vote was stopped(again,according to law) and Bush was declared the winner. Then the (partisan democrat)Florida Supreme court decided to bypass that law and ordered the recounts to continue. Then the US Supreme court basically told them “You can’t bypass yer own damn laws!”. And so Bush was again declared the winner.
While we’re on the subject of all the votes being counted, have you noticed that most people who complain about the outcome conveniently omit the controversial Absentee ballot issue(both overseas and domestic,particularly California)?
The Florida Supreme court simply and correctly decided that Gore’s challenge of the GOP certified “outcome” of the election was sufficiently serious to merit examination of the ballots in order to determine the intent of the voter as required by Florida law. On the other hand, the US Supreme court decided to stop the challenge dead in its tracks reasoning that the mere possibility of damage to Bush’s reputation outweighs any possible rights that the opposing candidate, or the states electorate might ordinarily posess. Seems like it’s the supreme court exposing itself as a blatently political animal here. The comments by a couple of them to the effect that they “needed a conservative president so they could retire” and the awards being heaped on Clarence Thomas do nothing to put the lie to that notion.
I assume that you are refering to this myth that the Republicans have been spreading about a million uncounted absentee ballots in California. These ballots supposedly could have turned the tide in the popular vote and given Bush the legitamicy that he so sorely lacks. The only problem is that the absentee ballots in California and every other state actually have been counted, and they only enlarged Gore’s margin of victory to over half a million.
The results are here: http://www.multied.com/elections/2000state.html
A Survivalist democrat-hating friend of mine told me that the Gore campaign used all sorts of sleazeball tactics to try and pump up its vote count in Florida, including counting the votes of dead people (a la what happened in Chicago during the 1960 presidential race). Is there any truth to this rumor?
Or of those who tried to prevent it (well, Stevens is nominally a Republican, but don’t tell me that the votes of either side came as a surprise). Obviously only one side was really and truly correct, but you can’t assume that it was the Democrats’ side just because the Republicans voted partisanly. As I pointed out above, it looks like it wouldn’t have mattered anyways. Keep in mind that no one was trying to get overvotes counted.
The Bush team made a rather strong legal case that counting the votes again under subjective and varying standards in only a few counties was not an acceptable way of doing that. Right or wrong, to accuse them of desiring less accuracy requires assuming their motives based on your opinion of tham. Sure, they knew that keeping the votes uncounted helped them. And the Democrats knew that applying a liberal standard for the dimpled votes would help them.
Basically, there were chunks of votes that could plausibly be counted or excluded for a variety of reasons with the ability to decide the outcome. The law was able to provide some guidance in how to decide these, and enough was ambiguous enough to fall victim to the partisan leanings of various courts in some areas. While it is true that the truth did fall victim to political wrangling, it was also true that in some areas there was really no way to determine the truth objectively.
I don’t see how the decisions that placed Bush in the Oval Office (which were certainly not made in an entirely objective manner) are any more deserving of criticism than any set of decisions that could have put Gore there. As a matter of fact, it would seem that the most fair thing would have been to establish clear standards (in accordance with preexisting Florida law) for counting the votes and do so, thoroughly and statewide. And it looks as if Bush would have won under that plan.
Does that mean that that is necessarily the most fair result? No, but it is the most fair process of arriving at a result. And I believe that it is essential to democracy and the rule of law that the laws be written and followed without regard to what the specific results will be. When the results of a decision overshadow the legal arguments, it makes for things like the Supreme Court’s decision.
There was a concerted effort not to use the standards you think most fair to find out who the winner was. That’s not the same thing.
Oh, don’t forget, Milo, ‘we’ (which admittedly doesn’t include you) pay attention to evidence around here. I’ve provided some, with a little help from the Washington Post.
You’ve made a big deal about the law as it existed prior to Election Day. It said something about ‘intent of the voter’ being key. The reason it might be worth paying attention to overvotes is that intent can be grasped with overvotes as well as undervotes.
Well, you could go and read the article, but that’s too much trouble for you, evidently. Needless to say, this doesn’t surprise me. You’re as hardworking as you are intelligent.
Ah, Achmed understands. The 4-3 split among the seven Democrats on the Florida State Supreme Court indicates that they were nonpartisan, whereas the 7-2 split among the nine appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, four of whom are considered “liberals”, indicates that they were partisan.
Perhaps thou wouldst like a loaf of bread to go with that jug of whine?
Ah yes, such as creating web sites on which people could “Nadertrader” their votes from one state to another to give more votes to Gore in too-close-to-call states, requiring that the vote be certified by such-and-such a date, extending the deadline to do multiple machine recounts, extending it again to demand a hand recount, locking the Republican observers out of the counting rooms and claiming they “rioted” when they demanded that the count be done in public, creating false allegations that minority voters were blocked by police at a roadblock two miles away from the polling site, appealing the election to a panel of seven Democrat-affiliated state supreme court judges, demanding that ballots with multiple holes in them be counted for the Democrat candidate, insisting that nobody would vote for Buchanan and that these votes must really go to Gore, claiming that Nader’s votes should be pooled with Gore’s since their positions were similar, and whining about the result when it all failed.
We mustn’t forget the petulant whining when it failed. That is very important.
Perhaps, due to various other legal problems with simply saying that the “intent of the voter” shall somehow be divined off of the ballots. At least that’s the rationale that the Supreme Court used, and I don’t see any reason to dismiss it as completely without merit.
I also don’t see any reason that Judge Sauls and the USSC were any less correct in their interpretations of the law than the FSC, which is arguably the most partisan body of the three (I’m not saying that the FSC is less correct either, just that these issues aren’t exactly as clear cut as many people would like to believe).
In any event, it is starting to look as if even the FSC’s interpretation of Florida law would have given the election to Bush. That is assuming that overvotes would not have been counted, which I’m not entirely sure of. At the time the recounts were being done, I don’t recall any mention of counting overvotes, so that’s what I’m basing that assumption on.
If Florida had been disenfranchised, it would have been its own fault – it would have been for just cause. Florida didn’t hold a fair election; Florida’s election shouldn’t have been accepted.
There was no other legal solution. We couldn’t let Florida do its election over. We couldn’t just say “we know these 3,000 Buchanan votes were really intended for Gore, so we’ll give them to Gore,” or “we know these 1,900 double votes were really for Gore, so we’ll give them to Gore”. We couldn’t say, “these people say they were unfairly prevented for voting for Gore, so we’ll count these people and give Gore the votes he should have received”. None of these things were legally possible. Tossing out Florida’s election results was legally possible. Congress could have (and IMO, should have) refused to accept Florida’s electors. Or the Supreme Court could have declared the Florida election results to be invalid.
And you, RTFirefly, are as willing to grasp a viewpoint other than your own as you are self-deprecating, understanding of your own intellectual limitations and a likeable human being.
From your “evidence”:
So, my response to that is wrong, how? What exactly am I missing from your almighty article?
You’ve got Gore and Buchanan punched; Gore and Nader punched; Gore and Bush punched. Who did the person on that anonymous ballot intend to vote for? As I said, “I wonder what the political inclination is of the people these votes are ‘clear’ to?”
So, do tell how one determines the “intent of the voter” from a ballot with two candidates punched or marked. Do point out more of your great “evidence” about how many overvoted ballots have been counted in the history of presidential elections in all 50 states, ever.
Do tell how many overvotes we should have given to Gore, because clearly that’s who they were meant for. Want to set a random number? Bring in some statisticians? What do we need voters for, anyway? Let’s just let the stats guys figure out who are president should be.
About that wacky Florida Supreme Court … did anyone else notice that they stated as a partial justification in all of their highly objectionable decisions that, in Florida law, the Legislature “invites” them to get involved in the process?
So isn’t it something that the Legislature was scrambling to take action to circumvent the court’s actions, which they found completely counter to the vast majority of the Legislature’s wishes?
Tranquillis suggests that those who are unhappy with the results of the 2000 Presidential election get to work to change the system, so it doesn’t happen again.
I briefly hoped that would be possible. I thought this election consituted a wake up call to America; time to institute some reforms: scrap the electoral college, provide for run-off elections whenever the winning candidate has less then 50% of the vote (or adopt instant runoff voting), abandon punchcard ballots.
Well, we may manage to get rid of punchcards.
But to my surprise, many Americans seem to see nothing wrong with a system that can award victory to the candidate who comes in second.
It was always plain that the potential existed for this to occur: in a close election, you could have one candidate win in the popular vote, and another win in the electoral vote. People who supported the electoral college said, “Don’t worry; it’ll never happen.” Well now it has happened, and what do they say? They say it’s okay; it’s fine with them. The electoral college, they piously proclaim, protects us from the tyranny of the big states and big cities; it protects the small states and rural areas.
They’re quite happy, it would seem, with a system that gives disporportionate weight to the votes of people in mainly white, mainly conservative, mainly christion areas. The “We only want our fair advantage!” attitude appears to be alive and well.
Yes, damn those idiots who want to avoid having the smaller states crushed by the will of the larger states. Wyoming has two senators just like California. This gives them a disproportionate vote in the senate which I find to be very unfair.
And you’d be quite happy, it would seem, with a system that allows the majority to drown out the voice of the minority. If we do have a system where the smaller states have no discernable voice then we’ll sow the seeds of discontent and eventually violence. After all nobody in these states voted for Lincoln…wait, that’s something else.