Except, Of Course, That They Like To Start Threads Complaining About Imaginary People Who Bitch About 2000 Without Any Kind Of Provocation Whatsoever.
Just “President” will suffice. What’s more, it’s accurate.
Why does this topic get rehashed all the time? Does anyone think anything’s going to change?
It occurs to me that much of the argumentation is very much partisan, on both sides. But I do have some observations:
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A Republican New York Congressman leading a bunch of protesters at banging on the windows of a county election commission engaged in a recount, with the apparent intent to disturb their work and/or terrify them into stopping the count. IMHO, every New Yorker worth his/her salt, regardless of party, should be out to get this man out of office.
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Persons in Palm Beach County who stated to reporters that they erroneously voted for Buchanan, requested a replacement ballot (as state law provided that they be provided on request, up to a total of three replacements) and were told to repunch the ballot with the candidate they wished to vote for (Gore, in most cases) and circle with a pen that punch – and the ballot would be counted for Gore. These are some of the overvotes that the Republicans said should not be counted because it could not be validly determined what the intent of the voter was.
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The counts I saw showed that Gore would win under most recount scenarios, but that Bush would forge ahead (with IIRC a plurality of two votes) if the most liberal, count-every-possible-indication-of-a-vote standard that the Republicans argued against were to have been used statewide.
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There are strong allegations that Scalia and O’Connor were motivated by political concerns in the two Bush v. Gore cases – including a report of O’Connor’s spontaneous remark at an election night party.
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Bush is the President of the U.S. under the rule of law – however partisanly applied the law may have been. The object at this point is to prevent a recurrence of the problems and offenses that happened – and Florida’s 2002 election indicates that the problems were not fixed.
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I would appreciate from Scylla an indication of which Presidential candidate during the 2000 election got a blowjob from an intern, and an admission of throwing a red herring into the works of this thread if he cannot provide me with the identity of the particular candidate who did.
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The fact that we’re still fighting about it 29 months later is indicative of a really great problem in America today – that very few people take the interests of the country as ahead of their “sectarian loyalties.” Heinlein referred to this as “the Spanish disease” because it destroyed Spain in the 1930s. I truly fear for my country while it continues.
I’m being selective only in the sense that I consider ‘scenarios’ that don’t examine all the votes to be irrelevant to determining the winner.
It isn’t that I’m choosing only scenarious where Gore wins, it’s that I’m rejecting all scenarios where incomplete counts are treated as definitive. It turns out that all of the complete counts show a Gore win.
A Bush win requires that you pick and choose various partial sets of ballots to count and various rules in which to do it. But the will of the people isn’t determined by handicapping various partial recount scenarios. The only valid approach is to examine all of the ballots that the machines say are invalid, and verify that they actually are invalid.
When you do that. Gore wins. Period. It doesn’t matter what standard you use to determine validity, so long as it’s fairly applied to all machine-rejected ballots. Gore wins.
Or in other words, your ‘scenarios’ where Bush wins are all the rationalizations of a loser.
NORC certainly states this, but, to be honest, I have my doubts. Their “most restrictive” standards (which anectodal evidence seems to indicate is the one most people are willing to accept) shows Gore winning by 115 votes. 115 represents about 0.066% of 175,010.
How do they know that the margin of error was greater than 0.066%? Three people looked at each ballot and came to a conclusion as to where it lay on the spectrum of “dimpled chad” to “clean punch.”
I can certainly understand there being some disagreement as to dimples and whether a chad is hanging by two or three corners. But clean punch? I don’t see that as leaving much wiggle room.
If I understood excel, I would download the data from NORC and examine it to see how often the three examiners disagreed as to whether a ballot was cleanly punched. I would then try to figure out a margin of error from that number. Truth is, I really have my doubts as to whether 115 is within the margin of error.
Hindsight is always 20/20 isn’t it? If Gore would have gotten the recount he asked for he would have still lost. You all seem to be ignoring the fact that ballots are rejected all over the country. If you want to take this to a logical end you would have to do a nation wide recount then. Who would have won then?
It’s those damn liberals. Like the OP. Love it or leave it, you pinkocommiesymp!
skankweirdall, keep in mind that almost 6 million people voted in florida. Only 3% of those votes were not counted by the machines. In most elections, that 3% really doesn’t matter. However, when the machines show the “winner” by a margin of 0.01%, that 3% becomes really, really important.
Clearly, the way to prevent similar legal battles in the future is to invest a bit of cash into updated voting machines. Of course, we don’t have any cash because the state governments are running in the red, and the Federal government has responded to the fiscal crisis by cutting taxes for the rich, ensuring that they also run in a deficit.
whew
No use in repeating what’s already been said. Though I do wonder how the vote count in Florida can be so suspect, but the nationwide popular vote can be so damned credible.
I actually look forward (yeeeehaw!) to the fireworks when 3/5 of the states are asked to amend to Federalize elections or abandon the Electoral College. … Hmmmm, well first maybe we should change that to only 2 states needed to amend, so California and New York can just go ahead and take over. …
But what’s the use? We already ignore the 2nd and 10th amendments
By what constitutionally mandated electoral process have you made that determination ? The much abused phrase “We report, You decide” tacitly proclaims the media’s irrelevence to legally deciding the outcome of an election. Are you claiming some error in that point of view ?
Pencil Pusher that is true. However those machines have already been replaced. Don’t forget either that the most hotly contested county, Palm Beach County, is also the wealthiest county here. The election comittee was staffed by Dem’s as well. They are also the ones that designed and approved the infamous butterfly ballot. If the ballot was as bad as everyone claimed it to be (and I personally didn’t see anything wrong with it) then they screwed themselves and in turn screwed the rest of the Dem’s.
I say this outright, I voted for Bush, he was not however my first choice, but he won by the laws and the ballots that were in place prior to the election. You can’t go changing the election laws after an election just because it’s too close and we need those votes. Gore had his recount, a machine recount, with the same outcome. He then went and asked for a hand recount in certain counties. He didn’t get that because it couldn’t be completed in the time frame allowed by the election laws at that time. If I’m wrong correct me here, but as I understood it, Gore took it to the SCOTUS to get the time needed to do a hand recount in certain counties only. He would have still needed a full statewide recount that was already too late to even ask for to start with. So by the laws at the time of the election, he lost. Plain and simple. Even Al has conceded this.
In closing Id just like to say [tongue in cheek] "If you can’t operate a ballot, you probably shouldn’t be voting [/tongue in cheek]
[nitpick]
If Gore had had sour grapes, he wouldn’t have been throwing a tantrum, yelling, “I won the election! I won the election! I won the election!” as some have suggested he was doing in his requests for recounts. He would have reasoned that he wouldn’t have wanted to be president anyway.
[/nitpick]
You know what Squink, there have been recounts since, if you must I’ll find the latest comprehensive cite for that, but frankly it’s irrelevant. It was an election conducted in Florida and therefore falls under the laws of Florida. If you feel that you got screwed in Florida somehow blame Al’s advisors for not telling him to seek a statewide recount.
The thing that bothers me most about these stolen election remarks is that it infers we would be living in Utopia had only Al won Florida.
Scylla said:
If the popular vote in FL is inconclusive (and it was, I wholly agree), why does Bush get FL’s 25 electoral votes? That is, why not give each candidate 12 votes, with a coin flipped for the odd one? Gore wins if you do that. (Yes, I’m aware that we live in a winner-take-all system; I’m more interested in a reason to award the electoral votes to Bush despite a statistical tie.) And why on earth was the person certifying the votes allowed to be the same person as one candidate’s state campaign chair? That, to me, (along with the Republican rent-a-mob) was the ugliest part of the whole fiasco.
What really annoys me, all these months later, is Bush’s ugly sense of entitlement. Bush has–from day one–carried on as if he’d won in a landslide. He is governing from the far right, when most Americans voted for a moderate. He had no mandate. He never tried to build one. He has constantly enacted a far-right agenda that Americans voted against.
Some say: “But Clinton was a minority president, too!” Setting aside the tu quoque fallacy, Clinton at least had a plurality. Bush did not.
Some wonder if “we” would be complaining about how close an election it was if Gore had emerged the winner?" I wouldn’t be, because he would have won the popular and electoral votes. Bush cannot make that claim.
Finally, to those who deride those who had trouble figuring out the butterfly ballot, I would like to point out that FL state law requires the two main-party candidates to be the first two on the ballot. (My Google-fu is weak, so I can’t find a better cite than [url = http://www.courttv.com/talk/chat_transcripts/111000election-lyons.html]this, which only mentions it in passing.) Re-analyze [url = AskTog: The Butterfly Ballot: Anatomy of a Disaster]the ballot in light of this. Tricky, eh?
I once came across an article on what might have happened if the roles were reversed. (New York Daily News, 11/01/00. I know this because I saved a quote for my signature file.) It doesn’t seem to be up anymore, but my recollection was that the Repubs were set to fight an electoral-popular split in favor of Gore. The reporter even seemed to think that they (the pubbies) were better-prepared for that scenario than the Dems. O irony. 
This indicates that Theresa LePore, the person who designed the Palm Beach ballot, was a Democrat in 2000, but not prior to 1996 or after 2000.
In heavily partisan counties, it’s common for DINO’s and RINO’s to run under false colors because the alternative is to be unelectable. It’s would appear that Theresa LePore’s sympaties lie with the republicans, despite what her offical party affliation was during the 2000 election.
Or, in other words, Dems didn’t “do this to themselves”. A Republican, pretending to be a Dem did this. Probably out of incompetence rather than malice. But it certainly wasn’t a case of self inflicted damage.
(D’oh! Could a kind mod fix my coding? I promise to be more vigilant in the future.)
(Thanks.)
I don’t see how that matters a damn. Personally, I am somewhat of both depending on the issue being debated.
In this case, I most deffinately voted for Gore (And would again if he runs in 2004), but from everything I have seen, Bush really did win the election as per the laws involved. I do hear a lot bellyaching about it, but have yet to see anything that proves otherwise.
What I know (limited to facts), are that Bush did have a slight majority in FL, and that Gore conceeded (without much gripping & poo-pooing form what I saw.) This tells me all I could ever need to know about the subject. Anything else is nitpickery that, frankly, casts doubt as to the leadership potential of the current Democratic Party.
I think Gore was smart enough to know that whining about it can only damage the Liberal (not a swear word to me!) party in the eyes of the 20% or so of the population that fits into the “undecided” camp in any election. Hence my thinking he is a viable candidate in the future. The ability to “Know when to fold 'em” in the words of Mr Kenny Rodgers is concept lost on many partisans (on both sides) these days, and rare in the political arena to begin with…
It seems to me that if Florida was truly “too close to call”, then the florida results are meaningless in assessing who should rightfully have become the president.
And then the vote of the rest of the country does have some weight. And the rest of the country chose Gore.
Yes, yes, I know all about the legal this and that. (not electoral…he didn’t win Florida, remember? Too close to call) Not my point. The point I am making is a moral one, for lack of a better term (because I’m getting old and it’s getting late and my vocabulary fails me). If the determining state was too close to say for sure which way it went (a concept I do not agree with, but for the sake of this argument will concede), it seems profoundly * wrong* to me that the all of the “decisions” would go for the person who got the *fewest * number of votes elsewhere.
And it is in that way that we who mention the popular vote at all mean it, I think.
It’s a good thing Bush did become prez. don’t y’all think. If he hadn’t, we might not be in Iraq making the world a safer place. Who knows, we might still have an economy comparable to the one before GW took office. Plus, SNL wouldn’t have all of the great material.
So, while he didn’t get my vote…I just want to thank those of you who did help put him in office. Y’all done good.:rolleyes:
Wouldn’t it have been quicker to have a new vote in Fla? Everyone would’ve gotten out to vote and made damned sure they didn’t screw it up again.
Did anyone seriously think the Bushes were going to let Junior lose Florida? <sheesh> Brother Jeb told him it was in the bag before the election ever took place.
BTW, I’m not bitching (for real) Gore would’ve been a big pussy and let Saddam play dictator for another decade. I’m wondering who’s next? Since we’ve got plenty of folks there anyway.
Why not go visit Yasser and see what terrorist activities he’s up to? It’s closer than Korea (Corea)…they can be next. Hurry up George, you still got time. 
Can you provide a cite for this? Thanks.