That would be the argument, yes. Having Bush the presumptive winner made Gore the litigant in every lawsuit. It made him look like a whiner.
That’s not stealing, however - that’s just agressive hardball. Gore should never have conceded.
Not “ordered” exactly; Bush’s first cousin, running Fox’s coverage, certainly didn’t need to be ordered.
At that point it was already clear that the process was heading into a long, contentious Recount City, lawyers everywhere, political implications everywhere, legal decisions being made on or at least strongly influenced by public opinion pressures. It was the start of shaping public opinion, by proclaiming a presumptive winner and allowing any challenge to be spun as Sore Losering. No, it had nothing *directly * to do with not counting all the ballots, but it was part of shaping the environment in which those decisions would be made.
I’d like to hear any of them come out and say why, but AFAIK none has. I’ve already offered that it’s a monkey see, monkey do industry; more to it might be the urge not to be scooped, or at least not scooped too badly.
To those interested in facts rather than spin, it did. That isn’t all of us, unfortunately, not nearly.
And that’s why those with the power to make those decisions have to provide not only the appearance but the fact of good faith. Democracy depends on that.
I thought that was done back in Post #2. Is there something left to say?
AFAIKnow, if you have any facts to offer, to leaven your handwaving and insults, you can begin do so at any time.
When are you going to address the 11 minutes problem? You know, the one that blows a hole in the middle of your hypothesis? Or the lack of any more than one of those 15000 people coming forward to say so? Your source made that shit up, you swallowed it, you’re getting called on it, and it’s somehow the fault of the person pointing it out to you, huh? Are you actually trying to convince someone of something? :rolleyes:
Your own source called it *“impossible”. * Now why, pray tell, do you think Bush News reported it anyway?
But a public perception that Bush was the frontrunner doesn’t change Gore’s legal situation at all, it doesn’t force Gore to litigate the result. The important number is the number the secretary of state certifies, not what the public thinks.
Of course public perception plays a part in how much hardball you can play, the public will be a little more forgiving of someone on the right side bending the rules than someone on the wrong side bending the rules. Of course, people are also a lot more forgiving when their side bends the rules than when the enemy bends the rules.
Anyway, its just that the “Fox called Florida for Bush” meme doesn’t seem to have any point behind it. Even if it’s true, so what? It certainly wasn’t stealing the election. Wouldn’t it make more sense to complain about undervotes and overvotes and voting lists and Jews for Buchanan and disqualified military voters and such?
And next time, win by more than a .01% margin. If the election isn’t close it’s a hell of a lot more difficult to steal.
And the SecState, even if she hadn’t been Bush’s own frickin’ state campaign chairman, was still a politician, less likely to go against what the public thinks than with it.
As for the litigation part, it would be comforting to think that the courts are above that sort of nonsense, but unfortunately they’re not only human but political actors as well. The scuttlebutt (freely admitted as such) that Scalia and Thomas and perhaps other Justices decided they had to act based on Fox showing the GOP-staged riot outside the Miami-Dade counting room was disquieting to me, wasn’t it to you?
I don’t recall anyone but you putting it that way. It *was * essentially a side issue, albeit a relevant one.
Done that many times here, many times. I’m ready if you are, though.
Are you seriously suggesting that one should win by more than a mere majority in a state run by your opponent? By how much? Is that seriously what democracy means to you? We’re not a banana republic, not yet, let’s not let it get that bad.
No, of course a majority of votes should win, even if it’s a win by one vote. The trouble comes in the things I mentioned before, exactly which votes should count, which votes shouldn’t count. If the election comes down to one vote, then every disqualified ballot can change the election, and therefore every disqualified ballot becomes a battleground. If 99% of the ballots cast are unchallengable then any race won by more than 1% is a slam dunk win.
Anyway, if the vote is extremely close, the side that controls the politcal machinery of the state has a huge advantage in the number of shenanegins they can pull, legal and illegal, ethical and unethical. And if they don’t do anything exactly illegal or exactly unethical, if they win the losing side is still going to believe they were robbed. Same thing happened in Washington state, where Gregoire won with a few hundred votes, with a recount in heavily Democratic King County giving the election to the Democrat. When you’ve got a 4 to 1 advantage in fellow travellers on the county election staff you’ve got a huge advantage in making sure the count goes the right way.
Hmm. Maybe if we made it a priority to have a nationwide, transparent voting system!
Nah, that’s ridiculous.
According to the link from my original cite, it doesn’t seem to be all extrapolation. They seem to have done an actual survey.
http://www.mclaughlinonline.com/newspoll/np2001/001120panh.htm
I don’t know what the typical panhandle turnout is either. Considering the west is more republican than the east, it doesn’t seem too far-fetched to expect that republican turnout would be higher than democrat like it was nationwide. Then again, an increase from the typical could explain that too. I’ll look also.
There is a plausible explanation of this which has to do with the way that Southern white Democrats have shifted over to voting more for Republican candidates as the Democratic Party abandoned its racist past and the Republican Party played out their racial strategy.
I would be very skeptical of that survey! You ask people who are already sort of embarrassed by the fact that they didn’t vote, “Did the news reports about Al Gore winning Florida influence you not to vote for President?” and you are going to get a certain percentage of voters who will answer yes even if it ain’t true because you have provided them with a golden excuse for their laziness. I imagine if you asked them if they didn’t vote because of the huge traffic backups that were being reported on I-10, you’d have gotten some percentage saying “Yeah” even though it would be a totally fictional event.
Sure people lie. But under your criteria how can you give credit to any survey?
AFAIKnow:
For the record, I agree with jshore on this - people’s response to questions after they’re told of news events will warp their memories of the actual event. The plenomenon can also be seen in that fact that after the whole “butterfly ballot” flap came out, more people claimed to have mistakenly voted for Buchanan due to ballot confusion than the actual number of Buchanan votes recorded.
Sorry to hijack this, but this deserves an answer, because it would be plausible.
But here’s the link, which also notes incredible Republican gains between 2000 and 2004. I think the Dixiecrat shift was done by 2000, especially in Florida, which has such a large “new southerner” population.
If you want to discuss it anymore, let’s open a new thread.
Oh, for the record, I don’t buy into the huge tampering scheme the article posits later, but I do accept the black and white data.
I think the discrepancies between exit polls and votes do point to something that should be investigated, because exit polls are trusted enough to be used as a metric of fraud in other countries.
But if the exit polls are more accurate than the vote counts, it doesn’t necessarily spell intentional number-changing - it could be that Democratic strongholds tend to have crappier voting machines, and that more Democratic voters are probably functionally illiterate, or disabled and have a tougher time voting. So getting a transparent system that is trackable, and allows the voter to see confirmation of the votes cast, should be a priority.
There. Now I’m really done.