Can / Should Gore demand re-election?

Great Debates
21

This is possible, because the panhandle is in Central Time. If Florida had been called at 7PM EST, there was still an hour left to vote in the part of Florida south of Alabama. But I believe they called it for Gore, which means Bush voters might have said, “Fuck it,” and gone home. If these hypothetical voters had voted, Bush might have won Florida by now and they would not be having a re-count. (And people think that having a state straddle a time zone is just an inconvenience! This could have affected a Presidential election!) OTOH, it could be that the polls in the CST portion of the state close at 6PM…? That’s how I’d solve the problem.

Minor problem with this: Alaska closes its polls at 7PM local time, which is Midnight EST. (I clearly remember hearing “Alaska has just closed its polls” at 9PM PST and then, shortly thereafter, announcing that Bush had won Alaska. I think Hawaii closes at 5PM HST, which is 10PM EST.) You think the networks are going to wait until then to project a winner?

22

This goes both ways though. Gore supporters, hearing that the state had already gone to their man, could have just decided to go home because they didn’t need to vote.

23

Thanks for the link, Drain. Now I understand it better. If that’s what the ballot actually looked like (I had also heard there were font problems, so the arrow might not have pointed directly to the punch), then I’m sorry, but I have to say that the people screwed up and that’s that. If there were other problems, then it might have to be looked into more closely.

24

Of course. But the point is that people have suggested that most of the people in that area are Bush voters.

25

Whatever the problems were, there may be an insurmountable difficulty in establishing that a given person voted mistakenly for Buchanon. How could it be rectified? Would they toss out the entire election in that district and have a re-vote in that district to determine the election? Would people get to change the election based on their own testimony that they had made a mistake? I can’t see that issue going anywhere.

26

I have to agree with Izzy. This is going to be a case of “You snooze, you lose,” for the Dems. At the same time, they can console themselves with the idea that Bush basically got the election by a fluke of luck, and the people’s REAL choice was Al Gore. Still, I think a runoff in Florida, or even in just the one county, would be fascinating, however unlikely.

27

If I understand the rules correctly (and this is just based on reading a bunch of news reports, I could be way off), the ballots will be presented to the Florida Election Committee (a three person panel consisting of Jeb Bush, Gore’s Florida campaign co-ordinator, and someone else) and a lawyer from each party’s National Committee; they will have to option to strike ballots that they feel are suspicious, but they can’t say, “Well, so-and-so really meant to vote for Gore.”

So unless there are a lot of suspicious ballots for Bush, or there was a serious under-counting of Gore’s ballots (due to the missing boxes which showed up a few hours late), and the incoming international absentee ballots can’t make up the difference for either candidate, Bush will carry Florida.

In theory, the recount will be done by tomorrow night. But we’ll have to wait for more than another week for all the international absentee ballots to arrive.

(And for those who propose abolishing the Electoral College- just imagine the process happening in every state in the union right now to get a more accurate national count! Isn’t that fun?)

28

I seem to recall (it was a long night) that ABC declared Florida for Gore at 8:00 or so, by which point all the polls were closed. Other networks might have been earlier, but I’m pretty sure they were going out of their way to wait until after each state’s polls closed to declare it. Any panhandlers know the real scoop on this?

29

Notes from a Tallahassee, Florida Doper.

The recount and all of the political twisting and turning have the makings of a poor novel, or a really good soap opera.

The state in question is Governed by the brother of the apparent winner. State personnel used in the recount are employed by State of Florida, and by extension its Governor.

Florida’s Attorney General is legally bound to conduct and supervise the recount. The Attorney General is a Democrat and Mr. Gore’s campaign manager.

Exact rules of the recount are hard to come by. Since nearly all ballots cast in Florida are via mark-sense forms, recounting of the ballots will be timely. What is unclear is whether all races will be recounted or just the presidential race. Since it takes no more time or resources to count ALL the races it certainly seems like a wonderful form of checks and balances against post election ballot box stuffing.

It seems highly suspect that “literally thousands” of Palm Beach County voters are so confused by the ballot that they vote for the wrong person, but their minds and memories are so sharp that they later “know” that they marked the wrong box.

And it is somewhat ironic that the Supervisor of Elections in Palm Beach county is a Democrat. So much for claims of dirty tricks!

30

I have not seen this claim made anywhere. Do you have a cite, or are you just engaging in a bit of hyperbole.

31

At last report, the margin of “victory” for Bush is now down to 1,725. (Before the re-count began, it was 1,784.)

What are they going to do if it’s dead heat AFTER the re-count and after the overseas ballots come in?

32

According to the Sun-Sentinel, Buchanan received 3,407 votes in Palm Beach County, as opposed to 786 in neighboring Broward County, and 561 in Miami-Dade County. Palm Beach County is one of the most heavily Democratic counties in the state. Given that, it seems clear that a good portion of people mistakenly voted for Buchanan.

As far as people later “remembering” this, here’s a quote from the Sun-Sentinel article:

Not to mention that the sample ballot given to voters outside the Palm Beach County polls had a different candidate order than the actual ballot; in fact, I read somewhere that Gore’s spot on the sample ballot was occupied by Pat Buchanan on the actual ballot, which would have furthered the confusion. I’ll try to find a source for that, but I’m reasonably sure it’s correct.

33

Southern Style:

I don’t think this is correct. News accounts (like this one) have suggested that it is the responsibility of the Secretary of State, a Republican. I’ve seen elsewhere that the Republicans have accused Mr. Butterworth (the AG) of interjecting himself into an area that is not his responsibility in the name of partisanship.

Most interested parties seem to be behaving remarkably responsibly, considering the stakes. With the exception of that wise and distinguished “civil rights leader” Jesse Jackson, who is threatening to sue, based on " “patterns of irregularities” that appeared to interfere with a full accounting of African-American voters."

34

Let me check on that Izzy.

I was using an interview with Mr. Butterworth from 7AM this morning as a source.

35

There seem to be a multiplicity of threads about the election. I apologize if I’m posting some of this in the wrong one.

1. With regard to the media calling Florida for Gore at about 8:00 p.m.:

Let’s all go find out who was responsible for that and give them a good slapping around. Man, when they called Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania for Gore, I knew he had it in the bag. I was practically singing “Happy Days Are Here Again!”. That was just cruel.

2. With regard to the Palm Beach County ballot mix-up:

A. Let’s all go give Theresa LaPore a good slapping around too.

B. That’s what comes of relying completely on the geezer vote to put you over the top. There was a pretty long line when I went to vote, but I still took a minute to pull my little punch-card out and verify that the squares I’d punched out matched up with who I thought I was voting for–and I voted for Gore in Georgia, which means that–at least as far as the Presidential election was concerned–I already knew I might just as well have set fire to my ballot right there in the voting booth.

3. This whole election is clear proof that the Ann Landers/Dear Abby twins and Paul Harvey are the secret puppetmasters who control the world.

Now, no one will dare stand against them when they re-run their “Did you know that a single vote once kept Uzbek from becoming the official language of the United States?” stories.

4. Weren’t there serious news stories about how the Bush campaign had “contingency plans” in case they won the popular vote but lost the electoral vote?

I swear I read that in that eventuality the Bush campaign had plans to lobby the members of the Electoral College to pretty please vote for George W. anyway, or ask Congress to pass an ex post facto amendment to the Constitution, or whine a lot until we all let him be President, or something. Does that mean he’s going to manfully concede the election now?

5. Screw Nader, the Natural Law Party votes could have swung this one.

According to the figures I’ve seen, John Hagelin (some flake who everyone always refers to as a “physicist” but who I believe is actually on the staff of Maharishi Univeristy) got more votes in Florida than the difference between Bush and Gore. If Gore had just gone down to Florida and quietly let it be known in the right circles that he believes in Transcendental Meditation (and would take the initiative in creating a Federal Transcendental Meditation Superhighway), he might have won the election. (I mean, assuming that he has not, in fact won the election, which I think is true, but I don’t pretend to know anything any more.)

36

They just stopped counting for the day. 10 counties in. There is a net gain for Gore of +8 votes, out of about 2,000,000 cast. I don’t know the raw numbers, but each candidate gained based on the original count.

At this rate (8 votes per 10 counties), it is highly doubtful Gore can catch up to the 1,700 or so he would need. It does look like Democrats are becoming more and more inclined to challenge the election. But what are they going to be able to do? I can’t see a court voiding the entire election for a re-vote; and I can’t see someone having the insight to look at a ballot and deciding that someone marked it wrong.

37

Perhaps someone can double-check the Florida statutes for me, but I believe that if Gore and Bush finish in a dead heat, they pick the winner by lot in Florida.

That would be frightening.

38

Just out of curiosity, I looked at the Florida countywide results and plugged some of the numbers in to see how many of the Buchanan votes might have been accidental. If one assumes that Buchanan should have got the high end of what other fairly populous counties give him (~0.25%), which also corresponds closely with the statewide percentage (0.26% after self-consistent correction, 0.29% before), then one would suspect that about 2300 of those 3407 Buchanan votes were in error. If one uses the percentages from neighboring counties of Broward or of Dade, that number could rise to like 2800 to 3000. (Of course, this all assumes there is not some other reason one can justify a higher percentage Buchanan vote in Palm Beach County than any other of the big counties…I don’t know enough about Florida demographics.)

I guess an interesting question would be if those broke almost exclusively for people who meant to go for Gore, or with some reasonable split between Gore and Bush. If one assumes, for example, that they would have broken in the same percentages as the other votes in the county, Gore only gets a net gain of ~600 votes using the 2300 wrong votes number.

Anyway, I am not saying anything can or should be done about it now. (I imagine they would have to find something pretty extreme…like some ballots that were much worse than others…to justify the feeling that the ballots themselves were that bad, given that the rate of confusion seems to have been on the order of 1/2–1% (depending on whether you believe it was confusing for all, or just for Gore voters).)

But, I just thought I would inject some sort of estimated figures for how many of the votes may have been mistaken under various scenarios.

39

jshore:

If you are going to count those Buchanan votes for someone, I’d imagine that they would all go to Gore. The reason why the votes are even suspect is because the second hole in the ballot might have indicated Gore. Anyone voting for Bush, and prone to making a similar mistake, would have just matched up the top hole in the ballot with the top name in the list.

40

I think we should recount all the primaries.
There is no way those two could really have beaten everyone else.