But will the execution be carried out with a 1920’s style death ray?
Better yet, we could just call everybody Treabilnairs!
This is an example of the dishonesty rampant among liberals. How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you post such blatant lies?
Odd that these allegations only surfaced after the election. If you’ve been purged from the voting rolls, isn’t the time to complain before the election? Have any of these allegations been proved in a court of law? And if any of these purges were legitimate, doesn’t that suggest that perhaps Democrats were keeping felons on the rolls to increase their votes?
A favorite stratagem of Republicans is to make sure that their absentee ballots are illegal?
No votes were purchased (How could they? We haven’t had an election yet). And seeing as how neither governors nor Representatives vote for the President, your reference of Bush is simply an effort to imply guilt by association.
The same collection of illegal, semi-legal and legal but deeply immoral techniques of subverting democracy will be used in those states should the Repubs win them.
The GOP under the Bush machine has become as corrupt and evil as Tammany Hall. If GOP supporters had an ounce of concern for the respectability for their own party, they’d be leading the charge to change it. **
[/QUOTE]
Sam, a repeatable process is not a repeated process. Yes, we know the “recount” in many cases consisted of running the same bunch of cards through the same readers, but that is hardly a real effort to determine the true winner. Even if it had been, no gauge R&R was performed as you not only suggest it was but claim to know the results of. Note that the media consortium recount (which you have misrepresented previously) did in fact come up with single, hard numbers as a result of a single, hard count, as the interests of democracy require. This is attribute data instead of the variable data you apparently see it as, and that’s only if you’re in a statistical state of mind anyway. No Green Belt program checkoff for you today, .
And you’re still missing, or perhaps evading, the central point: Bush in every case tried to avoid a complete count. Gore’s devotion to a full one may have been incomplete, sure, but was much closer to the interests of the citizenry and of democracy that a full, good-faith count would have been. At no time can you honestly ascribe good faith to Bush’s or the Supreme Court’s efforts to determine the true winner, and you don’t even try - it’s just the same “My guy’s in, yours isn’t, nyah nyah.” Sad.
The broader point, perhaps further beyond your grasp, is that democracy requires that election results not only be arrived at in good faith but that they be seen as such. Without that, the winner cannot have his legitimacy automatically accepted by anyone other than his own supporters. No effort of any kind by the camp you’ve aligned yourself with at a distance had any such consideration associated with it.
If you have neither the facts nor the law on your side …
In many if not most cases, they only found out on Election Day when they were denied ballots.
The organization that controls the voting rolls is the state Dept of State. Remember who ran it?
Apparently you also didn’t hear, or tuned out, about the hundreds of absentee ballots that were counted in Republican-controlled counties despite being postmarked after Election Day. Let that sink in for a moment.
His reference should have been to DeLay, whose instigation of the Texas redistricting has been pretty widely reported.
Other than that, though …
Point of Fact: No state has redrawn congressional district lines except in response to a court order or a census in modern history(since the Reconstruction era IIRC).[/Fact]
Enjoy,
Steven
I take it you are saying that the current situation in Texas is the first of its kind. It appears you are correct:
“This is a political strategy we haven’t seen before,” Tim Storey, redistricting analyst
for the National Conference of State Legislatures, told the Washington Post. “People who study this area can’t find any case in the last 100 years of mid-decade redistricting without a court order.”
Even the Republicans admit that what they are doing is a naked pwoer grab:
"According to the New York Times, Republican uber-lobbyist Grover Norquist (the subject of a major piece in the latest issue of Blueprint), admitted that “the point of the exercise was to help remove centrist Democrats from Congress, leaving only the most liberal behind.”
Thus, this latest outrage is not simply a matter of elephants trying to cage donkeys. If it succeeds, it will also reinforce the general trend toward a U.S. House of Representatives, and ultimately state legislatures, that are genetically engineered to avoid electoral competition and to represent only the ideological extremes, while disenfranchising the majority of Americans who consider themselves moderates."
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?kaid=131&subid=192&contentid=251845
And here is the smoking gun:
“I’m the majority leader,” said DeLay when asked about his heavy involvement in the Texas redistricting issue, “and I want more Republican seats.”
http://www.ndol.org/ndol_ci.cfm?contentid=251584&kaid=131&subid=192
So for the first time in recent US history, a political party attempts gerrymandering outside of the normal process of court- or census-directed redistricting, and openly states that they are doing it for the purpose of getting more seats, and you don’t think it subverts democracy?
Just a few questions Elvis…
-
In your opinion is it possible to have a 100% accurate presidential election?
-
If not, what is an acceptable margin of error? (i.e. 1% of votes aren’t counted due to user error/ballot lost/improperly manufactured counting machine, .1% of votes? .01% of votes? etc.)
Would you mind linking to the media count project and it’s results?
Welll… I disagree. IMO Gore was devoted to winning. His tactic of attempting to recount specific counties and not others was based on that devotion not in a good faith effort at upholding democracy. If democracy was what he was after then he would have asked for a complete recount. That he didn’t shows that he was primarily concerned with what was most likely to allow him to win.
I haven’t seen a scenario yet which, under the laws as they existed at the time, would have allowed Gore to win the election. From a practical standpoint what possible options were available which would have allowed Gore to win IYO?
Well…wouldn’t ya know it. Those recall happy pubbies are at it again. But this time it’s a pubbie Governor!
Go figure.
No. But it is possible to have 100% good faith at coming up with the real answer.
Not an applicable concept, as explained above. You count every vote according to the best good-faith interpretation of what the voter meant. Which, btw, was Florida law.
Soitenly. Read past the headline to the meat of the story.
I don’t claim otherwise. Note, though, that his position evolved from that after the first day or two.
That’s what the Florida Supreme Court was beginning to arrange when the panic injunction requests from Bush were filed with all federal courts up the line, being dismissed until reaching the firm of Rehnquist, Scalia, and partners. But perhaps I’m still not being clear - it wasn’t only about what Gore wanted or what Bush wanted, it was about what We the People should all have wanted and do require, in a functioning democracy.
A good-faith complete count of all Florida ballots, combined with the GOP-controlled legislature staying themselves from overruling the popular will. See above link for the results. I have never yet seen an argument that a full, complete count physically could not have been done in just a few days, have you?
Every candidate wants to win of course. Gore should have asked for a statewide recount, but he was pressured by arbitrary deadlines. But it is the intent of the voter that is sacred, not the intent of the candidate. Gore would have easily won Florida if overvotes were counted, in which the intent of the voter is clear. That is the law.
“Gore could have picked up 2,182 votes last November on overvotes where voter intent is clear, and Bush would have gained 1,309 votes, the media companies’ analysis shows. That difference would have enabled Gore to defeat Bush in any statewide recount that included overvotes, regardless of what statewide standard for counting undervotes was used.”
http://www.sptimes.com/News/111201/Lostvotes/Without_overvotes_Gor.shtml
Ryan, it was a blowjob, blowjob, blowjob, blowjob impeachment and EVERYBODY who was paying ANY attention when it happened knows it for a fact. Difference is, some Repubs uderstandably feel pressured to prevaricate about it.
No amount of denial will change what happened. The Big Lie won’t work when there are so many people around who saw the whole ugly thing unfold in all its hideous repulsiveness.
As for purging the voter rolls, ChoicePoint, the scumbags that did it, settled the lawsuit brought against it by the NAACP, per this quite from an online article:
Admit it, Ryan. Ya got nothing.
Obviously. For example, an election count may be repeated, but it is not repeatable, because you’ll get a different answer every time. Because it is not 100% accurate.
That is correct, but irrelevant. But did you notice that the first machine counts of only the undercounted ballots produced a slightly different result? This indicates measurement error. The machines are not 100% reliable.
Given that, you have to wonder what the result would be if you fed every card in the state back into the machines. How much variance would there be in output? Probably more than the difference between the two men. Measurement error from the machines alone probably swamped the difference between them.
You know, you’ve been smacked around in the pit a bit lately for constantly misrepresenting people’s opinions. You should learn from that.
I did NOT suggest a gauge R&R had been done. I said IF one had been done, it would show that the measurement error was far greater than the few hundred votes that seperated the two men.
This is what scientists call ‘false precision’. If we did this scientifically, we would assign a tolerance value to that result. “We determine that the number of people who voted for Al Gore was 10,525,253, ± 2000 votes.”, or “The count indicates that Al Gore received approximately 10,525,000 votes.”
The reason we don’t is purely political. Most people are not engineers, and will not accept the notion of an approximate result. They want ‘every vote to count’, so we maintain a fiction of perfect accuracy. But you and I both know better. Hell, the punch card readers alone come with a specification that says what their error rate is, and it’s NOT zero.
Then there is punch error, both random and non-random. An example of random punch-error would be inconsistent perforations in the punch cards. An example of non-random bias in the process would be the fact that some punch holes are more likely to be punched cleanly than others. For example, in the Votamatic machine there are support bars, and the hole closest to the support bars punch more cleanly than the ones in between, which have more flex. Interestingly, this bias may in fact have hurt Gore more than Bush, but it’s not clear how much of an effect it had.
Then there are ‘chad jams’, in which the punch machine chad reservoir fills and prevents complete punches. This apparently happened all over the place, randomly.
That’s just the punch process. Then there is card handling, spoiled ballots because of card reader jams, lost ballots, etc. ad nauseum.
Sorry, already got the Green Belt. DMAIC and DFSS. In any event, there is both attribute and variable data in this process.
Look, I’d rather get away from Bush/Gore and talk about the election process in general, in the future. Are you seriously going to argue that the election process is a single count, with a ‘hard number’, and therefore perfectly accurate? (hint: the count is only PART of the process, and it is inaccurate)
‘Less than complete’ is an interesting way to say that he didn’t ask for one.
You’re the one trying to portray one side as good and the other bad. I see it for what it was: A balls-up of an election, thrown into the courts because a longshot result happened. Once in the courts, both sides tried to do everything they could to win within the law. Bush prevailed, mostly through good luck - he happened to be on the ‘winning’ side of a tie. Neither man won. But someone had to be president, so eventually the Supreme Court had to make a ruling.
And let’s not forget that the Supreme Court voted 7-2 that Gore’s request was unconstitutional. So if Gore had gotten his way, wouldn’t the Republicans have a better argument that the law was subverted? It was only on remedy that the Supreme Court split down ideological lines. The problem was that by the time this thing made it to the USSC, time was rapidly running out for a reasonable solution.
Absolutely. Which is why I think it’s folly in the future to ‘improve’ the election system by getting rid of punch card ballots and such - that’ll just lower the margin for error, but the margin will still be there. It would be much better to make the whole process more scientific - spend some money on measurement error analysis, figure out just how accurate elections really are, and then specify run-offs or other remedies in the case where an election falls within the margin of error. That’s the only reasonable way to ensure that elections are always correct.
Btw, you did know that insults are frowned upon in GD, right?
I agree. And if Al Gore had won, I’m sure Republicans would be running around today screaming about stolen elections. That’s what happens when the result is this close and you don’t have procedures in place to handle it.
Evil Captor: that is an awesome quote, where did you find it? You would think that there would be some news coverage of the biggest case of election fraud in US history (until 2004), but zilch.
Then there’s this:
Dan Rocco
He died on April 1, 2002, in a plane crash in Gainesville, Georgia. He was an executive vice president at ChoicePoint, the firm that gained infamy with their faulty “felons” list supplied to Katherine Harris during the 2000 election in Florida. As a result of this list, thousands of voters (mostly African-American voters) were wrongly identified as felons and purged from the rolls.
http://www.bk2k.com/bushbodycount/stolen-election/bodies.shtml
I disagree. I don’t like Bush. I didn’t vote for him. He’s not “my guy”. But when it comes to the interests of the citizenry, following the law is more important than some subjective notion of fairness.
Sure I can. They were following the law.
How is that any worse than “your guy’s in, mine’s not, waah waah”?
And calling for a clearly partisan do-over would have made them seem as such? No matter which side won, the other side would feel cheated. That was unavoidable.
But I have both. Clinton was impeached on charges of perjury. That is a fact. Claiming otherwise is a lie.
How did they know where not to vote? Did they just go to a random polling place, only to be told that they couldn’t vote? Or were they told that they could vote at a certain polling place, went there, were denied, and said “Oh, okay. I guess I’ll leave then”?
So the accusation is what exactly? Those devious Republicans came up with the ploy of delaying those ballots past election day? If the Republicans are so crafty, wouldn’t it have been even better to make sure the ballots weren’t postmarked after election day, rather than accepting the ballots so postmarked? As I recall, many of those ballots were sent by men in the military, who had their ballots delayed due to inefficiencies in the bureaucracy. Was this part of a Republican scheme?
It’s not possible to have something which everyone agrees is good faith.
That was what the original count was.
I am neither Bush nor Gore. By “We the People”, you seem to mean “me, ElvisL1ves”.
Evil Captor
The Big Lie? Isn’t that where a person simply makes a statement repeatedly and VERY forcefully in the hope that eventually people will stop disagreeing? I was paying attention, and it was not over a blowjob, it was over perjury.
That doesn’t mean much. If you want to get into electoral shenanigans, how about talking about Daley? I’m not denying that there are dishonable Republicans. But I don’t see it as endemic or unique to Republicans.
TheRyan, is it not clear that the law must be enforced fairly in order for it to be considered followed? Maybe not.
“Clearly partisan do-over” - in what sense, in any of those words?
Clinton’s impeachment on perjury charges - you do remember what led up to that, don’t you? Or is that inconvenient?
“The original count in good faith” - you do know better. Never happened.
“How did they know where not to vote?” Come on now. If you have been a registered voter, you know where your polling place is. When denied, what recourse was available?
Re ballots postmarked after Election Day, you really can figure out the problem with that yourself, I’m sure.
Sam, you do know that votes were made that the machines didn’t register, either because of chad issues or because of overvotes. Censored data, ya know. Gotta deal with it - I do know that subject has been in the classes that everyone takes and passes at your current (and my former, btw, and very glad of that) employer (which I assume so based on your terminology), so I’m not impressed with that particular credential at all. Got it beat, in fact - I’ve taught it.
The rest of the folderol about “you guys would be just as bad as us if you had a chance” is tiresome, and not derived from fact.
Btw, you do know that persistenly posting false and/or filtered facts, and refusing to try to comprehend counterarguments thereby forcing repetition unnecessarily, is frowned upon in GD, don’t you?
A site called Democracy Now! Here’s the url:
http://archive.webactive.com/pacifica/demnow/dn20020906.html
note that it’s a site devoted to giving voice to people who don’t normally get much media coverage. The fact is that the Pubbies control the media to a much greater extent than most folks realize.
Look, the question they asked was, did Clinton have sex with Monica Lewinsky? Did she suck his dick? That was the question that spawned the “perjury” charge, and it was never a question that should have been asked, because it was never any of their damn business. No matter how you cut it, no matter what you say, the truth of the matter is obvious: the perjury charge was the pretext for the impeachment, the substance of the matter was the blowjob and the Repub obsession over it. You would have to be a Repub ideologue or willfully ignorant not to get that.
**That doesn’t mean much. If you want to get into electoral shenanigans, how about talking about Daley? I’m not denying that there are dishonable Republicans. But I don’t see it as endemic or unique to Republicans. **
So, I demonstrate that Choicepoint was indeed a bunch of scheming scumbags working on Bush’s behalf, and the only argument you have is, that Dems have at some point done bad things too. I’ll grant you that, unlike you, I don’t pick fights where the facts are clearly not on my side. But the fact is that in the last two decades the Repubs have engaged in a pattern of electoral cheating so obvious that if the FBI wanted to get wiretaps for Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, they’d have no problem whatsoever if they didn’t have all those partisan Repub judges to deal with.
Am I wrong, or are you now supporting my point? I just said that votes were made that weren’t registered because of things like chad blockages. I also said that this hurt Gore more than Bush. Do you just skim messages, or what?
Actually, it didn’t come up at all in Six Sigma training. And I was making these points before I took the courses. I happened to know a fair bit about statistical analysis before then, y’know. Education, and all.
Whatever you say. The rest of us will draw our own conclusions.
Yep. You have some examples? Other than your claim that I said a Gauge R&R had been done, when I said no such thing?
Elvis,
Read it. The hypothetical scenario which gives the presidency to Gore is a statewide recount which includes overvotes.
I’ve looked around on the web for info regarding a full statewide recount which included overvotes but have been unable to find anything. All of the 2000 presidential election summaries and coverage that I have found indicated that the Florida Supreme Court only made rulings pertinent to undervotes (Samples here, here, here and here). Could you please provide a cite showing that the FSC was arranging a statewide recount of both undervotes and overvotes?
If a full statewide recount which included overvotes was conducted it may have indeed resulted in a win for Gore. However, I see this as being an impractical, questionable and implausible scenario. Implausible since AFAICT no one requested a statewide recount which included overvotes. Impractical since the hand recount of only four counties took days (how long would a statewide recount take? Certainly more than the few days you posit IMO). Questionable because according to the summary of the media recount:
The least questionable inclusion of overvotes involves counting votes which have a candidate punched as well as their name written in. A statewide recount including these overvotes would have resulted in a 200 vote win for Gore.
If the following highly permissive standard statewide is used Gore wins.
However this is a subjective and sloppy method of counting votes. The article examines the butterfly and broken ballots. Some of these votes were disqualified because two candidates were selected. In this case the article plainly states that:
The article also indicates the following limitations of the study:
Serious problems with record keeping at local election offices. Different marking rates between men and women. Slight but significant relationship between marks and investigators party affiliation.
All of this discussion seems moot due to the fact that AFAICT no one pursued a statewide recount which includes overvotes. IMO, in light of Florida’s laws at the time, and following the rule of law, the strategy pursued by Gore and his legal team provided a practically 0% chance of victory.