http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=11900
Ultimately, It’s the choice of the electorate that makes a legitimate election. Legal strategems are for election thieves.
What’s your point? That Republican voters base their decision to vote on what the news tells them, and that the only thing they intended to vote for or cared about voting for was Bush for Prez? And maybe you are further making the point that not one single Gore voter stayed away from the polls based on the same information?
Or is this some kind of wacky geography quiz?
Now Spoofikins, let’s not muddy things up too much…who was the first person to go whining to the courts that recounts just weren’t fair? Why, I believe it was Georgie Peorgie. You wouldn’t be trying to make it seem like he didn’t attempt to move heaven and earth to stop * any and every possible recount ever suggested by anybody ever *, are ya? Cuz it just ain’t so, and you know it. It certainly wasn’t his gentlemanly restraint and sense of fair play at work, that’s for damn sure.
Tejota:
Interesting cite. By what method did they tabulate the “disputed” votes?
- Voting irrigularities swing both ways, This is planet earth, we are humans, we try to make a fair system and we do the best we can but sometimes mistakes are made (Bucannan votes, discouraged voters, ect.), learn and move on, don’t try to change the past.
The mandate came in the '02 elections, A historic event where in a off year election the Pres’s party takes/holds both houses.
Wrong. Jeeze, will you people frigging read your cites rather than just go by the misleading headline??
The article you refer to isn’t a full count, but only a count of undervotes. A definitive count has to look at both undervotes and overvotes. The partial counts are interesting, but they don’t tell us who really won.
It says right in your article that the full count of over and undervotes was still pending at the time that it was written.
The problem with this approach is that it suggests that the political parties are the only affected parties to this dispute, and we, the people, have nothing to do with it.
Neither you nor I got to sign off on that ballot, and just because some county-level party functionaries did so, doesn’t exactly make me whole here.
I’ve got some papers presented at the American Statistical Association’s annual meeting in 2001 that show pretty clearly just how many Buchanan votes we can assume were intended to be Gore votes.
No doubt: that butterfly ballot put Bush in the White House.
Frankly, if we can look at a single ballot and determine on the basis of pregnant or hanging chads that, even though it was originally counted for candidate X, it really represented a vote for candidate Y, we can’t do the same for a group of several thousand ballots on the much more sturdy basis of statistical inference.
In order:
(1) is a red-herring. Most of the people who have problems with the election have a problem based on the fact that the citizens of the state of Florida elected Gore.
(2) do a couple of Internet searches. The “rioters” in Miami-Dade county were mostly Washintonians who were bussed down to Florida in order to interfere with the election. Probably illegal.
(3) This is mostly accurate. Bush did win under the rules. The problem was that, given the time limit imposed by the rules, it was impossible to know what the state of Florida wanted. So various people made various suggestions in order to guess what the will of the people was. Keep in mind that they were all guesses. A partial recount of these counties. A partial recount of those counties. Including only X but not Y, etc. etc.
However, once all the disputed ballots were examined by a media consortiam, it was determined that Gore won every standard that included counting all of the disputed ballots from all of the counties (i.e., the entire state of florida). It did not matter whether you are talking about “clean punch only” (commonly called a “correct vote”) or “dimpled chads,” Gore won every single standard. It is only when you take convoluted scenarios (only undervotes and not overvotes + ignoring certain counties, or only counting votes from four counties) that Bush won.
So, to recap, Bush won various scenarios that attempted to estimate who the winner was. Gore, however, had the most votes in the state of Florida. Bush won under the rules of the game, but those rules did not accurately represent the will of the Florida people.
Me, I’d be equally outraged.
The main difference I see between the Republican and Democratic parties is that Democrats seem more willing to criticize their own people, whereas Republicans seem to have a untied front, right-or-wrong-he’s-still-our-guy mentality. I really do think that if the situation was reversed you’d see even more criticism of Gore than you do of Bush currently, and from both sides.
Before you get the wrong idea, I think that self-criticism within a party is very healthy. I * want * to see our leaders aguing over every policy decision, rather than just being a rubber stamp for the administration in power.
Well the sonofabitch keeps trying to cut my taxes, but he just refuses to buy me a drink.
[sub]Rem: I am quite happily straight and male. Just in case the homosexual twist was not intended to be part of the joke.[/sub]
Say what? Just keep reading… “disputed” is simply shorthand for overvotes and undervotes.
By any chad counting standard. Gore wins when all of the votes are counted. The only way to get a Bush win is to ignore the overvotes, (which is what all of the recounts until the final consortium count did).
It turns out that there were a substantial number of clear Gore votes among the overvotes. In most cases, this was because there was a Gore punch and also a Gore write-in. Which is stupid a stupid thing for a voter to do. But perfectly valid even though the machines can’t read it.
Interestingly, The bulk of these valid overvotes came from counties that Bush won.
I think it was the repetitive spouting of recycled dittohead lies about state and federal law that clued me in. That and the pejorative use of “liberals” as a pseudo-epithet.
Deductive reasoning. A fine and worthwhile contribution to Western civilization.
“Well at least our President didn’t get a blowjob from an intern!!!”
LOL, that’s the cherry on this sundae of a thread.(colour me shocked on the reply count sprint.)
Observational humor. It’s funny because it’s true.
I won the election, in violation of every single election law on the books.
But no one will believe me. 
Tejota:
I’m just wondering by what criteria one decides which of the overvotes and which of the undervotes to count. What your article later goes on to state is the margin by which Gore appears to win if these unnamed criteria are applied. It seems there are many different standards by which these may be counted, and considering that there’s about 100,000 of them, I would guess that a margin of 47-178 or so IIRC correctly falls into the any method’s margin of error. Since by definition over and undervotes are somewhat ambiguous, this is hardly conclusive. Throw into the equation the polls closing early in some Republican areas, and problems with rural voters, and trying to find a valid conclusion gets even tougher.
In fact, your cite bears me out on this conclusion:
Your cite shows scenarios by which both Gore or Bush won. You have elected to represent only that part of the cite which gives an example of a scenario under which Gore won. Hardly a fair representation.
Your cite in fact shows what most people of reasonable judgement have probably already long since concluded.
The vote was in fact too close to make a conclusive statement.
No. It’s not true, and you know it. We determine elections by the electoral college. Bush won that.
Any reasonable person knows the FL popular vote fell with the margin for error and is indeterminate.
So you’re cool with it if I refer to Dubya as the Inconclusive President?
Indeterminate President works too.
I’m cool with whatever you want to say. If you wish to be accurate than thing to do is concede that Bush won the election while the popular vote in FL was inconclusive.
I readily concede that Bush won the electoral vote, and have never contended otherwise.
How 'bout the Guy Who May Or May Not Have Been Elected President, But The Republicans Don’t Care Either Way?