Gore didn’t have one of his first cousins running election-night coverage for a major network, either, Hentor. John Ellis of Fox has made no secret of the fact that he, Cousin Dubya, and Cousin Jeb were in constant telephone contact all night. There aren’t many ways possible to connect those dots.
And yet, almost certainly, one candidate had more people voting for him than the other guy did. That’s how we decide elections. It is *necessary * to find that out - we can’t just call it a tie - what’s the tiebreaker, then, in your philosophy? Other states were very close, too, but had clear winners upon closer inspection. How close should a vote be before you think we should throw up our hands and call it a tie and then do, well, what?
The argument that it’s all just statistical noise is false. If it were, the errors would be about evenly distributed either way. But they weren’t - the known “errors” virtually all went the same way, and therefore are extremely improbably random or innocent.
Diebold acquired its election systems division in 2002. Therefore, Diebold played no part whatsoever in the 2000 election, unless you want to talk political contributions and employees voting.
I’m missing something here. I’ve read the article at the link, and AFAICT, the Diebold problem in Volusia County is said to have affected the vote totals only long enough to affect the TV network calls, and the briefly missing votes were ultimately restored.
I don’t consider that to constitute ‘throwing the election,’ no matter what it did to the battle for public opinion.
However, it reinforces my conviction that in states and counties using electronic voting, the precinct vote totals must be posted at the precincts before the memory cards are removed from the precincts, in order to assure no tampering with vote totals at County HQ. Independent observers can then record and total the posted precinct totals, matching them against the totals published in each county.
It’s too late (politically, if not technically) to assure a paper trail for every vote this November, but it’s hardly too late for voters to insist on this simple fix.
Yeah, that is my reading of the article too. Do you agree, rjung? I.e., these 16,000 votes were ultimately restored to Gore’s total. By my reading, what the article is pointing out is:
(1) What does it say that the Diebold system even allowed such a bizarre thing as a negative vote total to be added to Gore’s count? And, how did this happen anyway since it seems hard to have it happen erroneously…Was it an attempt to tamper with the results?
(2) What does this say about what could have happened elsewhere with the Diebold system and not have been detected?..Or what could happen in the future?
Actually, I realized that what I said is a little simplistic in one respect: Even though this error was ultimately corrected, one could argue that it affected the outcome because it affected the whole psychological atmosphere in which the recount proceeded. I.e., without this error, it is likely that the networks would never have called the state for Bush but kept it as “too close to call” pending a recount. And, it is also likely that Gore would have never have made his initial concession that he then retracted. Whether all this would have caused the Florida debacle to play out differently is really in the realm of speculation.
Most of the conspiracy theories about the Florida vote seem to require that a plan was in place prior to Election Day to give the state to Bush. But who knew ahead of time that the Florida electoral votes would be the deciding ones? In fact wouldn’t the Florida vote have been a non-issue if Al Gore had only managed to win his home state?
“Conspiracy theories?” Um, Dewey, you’re not trying to discredit some well-documented abuses with a feat of nomeclature, are you?
Are you aware that about 90,000 mostly Democratic voters were illegally disqualified from voting despite two court orders telling Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush to cease and desist?
And, by the way, it really ought to be obvious to anyone that the very idea of using a voting system that doesn’t have some kind of verifiable paper trail is absolutely, irredeemably whack. I mean, it’s like having some B-girl wear nothing but stockings and garters and then having her bend over in front of a throng of recently released prisoners. The invitation and opportunity couldn’t possibly be more obvious nor the consequences any more predictable or ugly. The fact that this is actually being done (the former not, to my knowledge, the latter) shows that we truly are a nation of boneheads.
Anyone who paid attention to the polls just might have suspected it could happen, ya know? Dubya only had one brother serving as a Governor to help him, anyway.
(1) In fact, Florida was one of a handful of states that was known to be likely to decide the election in the event that it was close, because of its combination of it being very tight race there and having a fairly large number of electoral votes. In fact, as this chart shows, Florida was #4 in terms of electoral votes and I don’t believe any of the top 3 states (California, N.Y., and Texas) were in serious contention. Both candidates spent a lot of time in Florida. See this article from a week before the election for a discussion of Florida (and of Tennessee).
(2) You know the saying, “Think globally, Act Locally”. I am afraid that might apply to election shenanighans too. That the Florida fiasco received so close scrutiny is because it did make the difference in the election. It may very well be that irregularities occurred in other states but that they were not sufficient to affect the outcome of the election.
(3) Whether or not Al Gore won his home state is irrelevant. Tennessee has become quite conservative and so it was known that Gore might not be able to hold it. (Currently, both Senators are Republicans, for example.)
What exactly is pitiful about it? Should the voters of Tennessee have voted for Gore, even though they disagreed with his politics? Or should Gore have run on a conservative platform, instead of going with the values he actually believes in, just to win a symbolic victory in his home state?
Perhaps not a more conservative platform, but a more effective campaign. For example, he constantly got shit about supposedly saying that he invented the internet but never refuted it properly.
You seem to have missed the context of my post and perhaps some of the words in it as well. I was replying to Avenger’s assertion that if we “Add in the tens of thousands of disenfranchised voters from democratic demographics and the state would’ve been fairly solidly for Gore.” I was showing that if we did as he suggested Florida would still have had a nearly balanced electorate. ( Hopefully this clears up MaleBox’s confusion as well. ) Notice also my post states that one candidate, Gore, certainly had more people voting for him than the other.
Nor do you, as a moderate Democrat, have any standing to question this radical Green’s commitment to majoritarianism. You support our undemocratic Constitution whereas I believe we should tear it up and start over with a system based on majority rule.
Oh, so that’s what “the electorate was basically split down the middle” means in your dialect. The “context” of your post was that we shouldn’t bother trying to figure out the winner if the count is close enough.
I actually agree we should go to a straight popular count. Are you surprised? I also actually think we should *all * follow the rules that are in place at the time of an election. I certainly do “have standing” as a citizen to oppose your suggestion that we should simply ignore rules we personally dislike rather than bother changing them.
If Diebold WAS cheating on Bush’s behalf, they sure did a lousy job of it! Why did they have him win by only a few hundred votes, which could easily have been overcome in a recount? Why didn’t they give him a landslide? Or at least a COMFORTABLE lead?
If there WAS a conspiracy (and frankly, this sounds like more of rjung’s usual tinfoil-hat stuff), I’d say G.W. Bush should call Diebold and demand a refund!