Thanks captor, that pretty much sums it up.
I would have supported a full statewide recount, using the standards set before the election. Unfortunately, Gore never asked for one, and as I understand it, there was no law in place that allowed for one.
I hope you can see the problem with changing the rules after the fact, right?
And I flat-out disagree. The only media recount that occured after the election showed Gore ‘winning’ by about 200 votes. I’ll ask you again: Do you REALLY believe that a manual recount of millions of ballots, with humans examing each one and deciding whether or not it is valid, would be accurate to within 200 votes? I suspect the actual error rate is at least an order of magnitude greater than that. Especially if we are scrutinizing each ballot for dimpled chads, hanging chads, etc.
Also, remember that tthere were no uniform standards. Some counties were accepting hanging chads with two corners detached, some with one, and some not at all. Then there’s the question of what you do if a ballot shows a hanging chad on one spot, and a dimple on another. Or one chad hanging by two corners with another hanging by one. Etc. ad nauseum. Once you involve human judgement and eyeball inspection, you can’t hope to have an error rate that low.
He was chosen because that’s the way the law was written. He came up the ‘victor’ because he was ahead on votes. But I’ve said over and over again, that Bush did NOT win. The election was a tie. Any recount that would have showed Gore winning by an equally slim margin would have been just as suspect.
The only ‘fair’ thing to do in this case was to just follow the law as written. Sure, Gore got screwed. But we are ruled by laws, and you can’t make exceptions like that. The Supreme Court agreed, by a 7-2 margin.
Going forward, I advocate an election reform which recognizes the fact that elections are imperfect and prone to measurement error. We should institute laws that say that if the result of an election is withing X%, an automatic run-off election occurs between the two candidates that received the most votes. Said runoff to occur within 15 days or something like that. The answer to an election that is not knowable is not to guess, or keep counting again until the variance happens to have your guy come out ‘ahead’. The answer is to re-do the entire election.
That’s not accurate. There was no law that allowed GORE to request one. The law does allowed the courts to require one as part of their ‘remedy’ to a lawsuit.
Which, it turns out. The Fla SC did order, and SCOTUS stopped.
Still, it’s nice to see that you are no longer blaming Gore for not requesting a statewide recount, but just because HE couldn’t request it doesn’t mean it couldn’t be ordered by some other actor. I suspect that Cruella could have ordered it as well as the courts, but the question never came up.
Damn, this lie again. Ok, once again, for the record, again Florida has always required elections to be decided by counting all valid votes. And has always defined ‘valid’ as ‘those for which the intent of the voter can be dicerned’.
It is you who advocate changing the rules by saying that the 2000 election should not have been decided by counting all of the votes and determing the winner by the ‘intent of the voter’ standed.
Yep. In fact, given sufficient care, it could be accurate down to a single vote. The theoretical limit of accuracy is that provided by forensic science. But, then again, you know that don’t you?
Do you have any idea how many votes that ‘non uniform’ standard represents?
No, I didn’t think so. In any case, the consortium didn’t pick any standard. What they did is make a count describing the actuall ballots. i.e.
1000 clean X Punches,
20 3 corner chads for X
12 2 corner chands for X
etc.
Then they sumarized their results, thus:
regardless of what standard was used Gore won by at least 200 votes. If the 3 corner standard was used, he won by X, etc.
The ONLY senarios where Gore didn’t win was when only some of the votes were counted. (i.e. only undervotes rather than all valid votes)
This is a flat out lie. Florida law required the the winner by chosen by the ‘intent of the voter’ standard and that all valid votes by counted.
And the election was NOT a tie. Bush made a deliberate effort to prevent the accuracy of counting from being enough to decide the election properly, but that doesn’t mean that the was not a correct answer. There was an answer, and the consortium recount proved it.
Some of us think that finding that answer BEFORE awarding the election to someone was of paramount concern. Florida law, and the Fla SC agreed. The Rhenquest 5 and the democracy subverters in the GOP disagreed, and they held the power to force that corrupt result to come about.
Exactly. And if the law had been followed. The full statewide recount that the Fla SC ordered would have gone forward and Gore would not be president.
Those of us who believe that the law should be followed are arguing that the election was stolen.
The real question, is why aren’t you with us rather than defending the theft with your considerable rhetorical skills?
Damn, That lie again too. 7-2 agreed that there were equal protection violations in Fla. But the decision not to actually count the votes in Fla was made 5-4. as you well know
Sigh, Gore would now be president.
And in this, you have just neatly ignored everything Sam has been trying to say. Well done.
Because what he is saying is bullshit. 3 people looked at every single vote. Those that were weren’t agreeed on unanimously by that 3 were then sent to completely differnet set of 3 people who then made a determination.
Sam’s allegation that the counting was being done sloppily doesn’t even pass the laugh test to those who know what what the counting procedures looked like.
It’s not like one guy took a hundred no-doze and stayed up until he got the job done, although that is the sort of sloppyness that Sam wants you to envision.
3 pairs of eyes for every obvious ballot, and at least 6 for every judgement call. Under those circumstances, there’s no reason not to expect a perfect count.
There’s every reason not to expect a perfect count. One does the best one can, and as you say, they did. But when the act of counting by its nature changes what might be the result of future recounts, when the act of counting requires a value judgment, when the coutning requires a subjective criterion on something that has not necessarily been perfectly preserved from its initial state… One has the potential for error. Indeed, the moment you introduce a person, no matter how careful, you run into the potential for error. And I would contend that if you and I were to both count the same things and have a non-trivial potential for getting different answers at the end, it’s pretty much by definition not a perfect count.
Which is not an excuse not to try, but everyone ought to be aware that such things inherently come with some level of uncertainty as to the results. Honestly, I’m a little surprised that there are people who would be willing to argue otherwise.
Now, I’m not willing to put a level of uncertainty to this process myself, as I don’t have the expertise; it could be +/- 200 votes, or 2000, or 2. But to assert that the uncertainty is nonexistent requires more blind faith in the infallability of oh-so-fallible humans than I would have credited anyone with having.
And that is also bullshit. The only way counting the ballot could change the ballot would be if the chad had already been punched loose and handling caused it to drop entirely.
Think about that. The ONLY way that a chad could drop would be if it was punched. And if it was punched, then it was a valid vote to start with.
The notion that handling ballots would change them in ways that changed their meaning as votes is pure FUD. It simply isn’t true.
Now, if you had a chance to handle ballots in private, you could add punches and invalidate valid ones. But that never happend.
I didn’t say the count was being done sloppily. I said the process simply can’t be that accurate. People make mistakes, even when they are trying very hard. Ballots get damaged in the counting process. People have bias. Why do you think scientific studies are done double-blind? It’s entirely possible that a person who supports Bush or Gore could ‘discern’ a vote for one or the other where none exists, even where they are making an honest attempt to be as fair as possible.
Just keeping track of the ballots, moving them around, sorting them, tallying results, etc. are all subject to error. I seem to recall a box of ballots was found in someone’s trunk. That happens frequently in elections. It’s a massive undertaking to hand count millions of ballots, and the notion that it can be done with anything approaching 100% accuracy is, in my opinion, wrong.
And my other point, which went wholly ignored, is that the count is a measurement of the result of a process which is already rife with error. Even if you could count all the ballots with 100% accuracy, that does not mean they accurately represent the will of the voters. In fact, you Democrats have been making this case in Florida - the ‘butterfly ballot’ almost certainly cost Gore thousands of votes. I agree with this. There are no doubt dozens of other systemic flaws in the process, many of which went undiscovered. I already pointed out some of them in previous messages - chad blockages, biased ballots where one candidates name appears closer to a support bar and is therefore more likely to register a vote (this also appears to have hurt Gore).
If you believe that Gore won the election by thousands of votes (which most Democrats do), and yet a full recount showed a difference of only a couple of hundred, that MAKES my point. Elections are approximations.
Try to divorce what I’m talking about from the contentious issue of the Florida election. I know you’re spitting mad about it, but it’s history. I’m more interested in a theoretical discussion of elections in general, and what can be done to make them more fair. The strategy people seem to want is to try and eliminate all sources of error - going to computerized ballots, etc. I think that’s a bad way to go, because it’s expensive and not necessary in the vast majority of cases, since most elections are won by margins that ARE greater than the inherent error in the process, and it’s also no guarantee of true accuracy because of other systemic issues (for example, a traffic accident in a heavily democratic area that may prevent some voters from voting).
Much better to have a rule that says an election is a tie if the two leading candidates are within X votes, and have a run-off. If you do that, you can keep current systems in place, and states with less accurate systems can simply increase the margin of error.
Once again, you are suggesting a method of counting that IS NOT WHAT HAPPENED.
If you and I sat down and countined 10,000 ballots at the same time, and every time we disagreed, that ballot was set aside and looked at but a different team of 3 people. It simply isn’t reasonable to expect anything other than a perfect result.
Single humans are fallible, but multiple humans set up in such a way as to correct each other’s errors are going to be far more reliable than a machine (and also a LOT slower).
This is common sense, that somehow gets discarded all of a sudden when Republicans talk about the 2000 election.
The supposed subjectivity and ballots changing was pure dishonest spin. There were procedures to handle the subjectivity, and ballots could only change if they had dangling (i.e. punched but not detached) chads. And as I said before, a dangling chad was already a clear indication of voter intent so having it detach wouldn’t change the meaning of the vote in any way.
Fair enough. Maybe you should try and discuss the theory of elections in a thread that isn’t about Republican’s subverting democracy :rolleyes:
The 2000 election was not a tie. It wasn’t even close. The final count was close to a tie. But there were a variety of sources of substantive systematic bias, and all of them harmed Gore voters. The Butterfly ballot. The ‘vote on every page’ ballot. The illegal non-felon purge.
Each of those individually cost Gore enough valid votes to swing the election.
But even with the systematic bias against Gore, he still had the most valid votes. And Bush got the presidency finally by the simple expedient of preventing them from being counted.
Now, that may not chap your ass, living in Canada as you do. But some of us Americans take the notion of actually, you know electing our leaders pretty seriously. And when the guy who ends up in office isn’t the one who we elected, That tends to make us angry. And we tend to STAY angry as long as he squats in the job that he stole.
I can understand why you wouldn’t care about this one way or another. But what I don’t get is why, whenever the subject of the 2000 election comes up. You feel the need to shill for the RNC? Why prostitute your own honesty for Bush? Why tell the official lies?
I understand why I’m not gonna get over it. This is my country, and an election was stolen and I’m gonna stay mad until it gets made right. I’m gonna get over it when it no longer affects my life, but it never affected your life in the first place. And yet, still you show up. and treat us to a coctail of official lies along with your personal observations. One is tempted to think that you can’t get over it either, and that just makes not sense.
Oh, for the love of Christ. It should be obvious to anyone with even half a functioning brain cell that if single humans are fallible, multiple humans are likewise; less fallible, admittedly than single humans, but fallible nevertheless. For you to pretend otherwise is just silly.
In other words, I am not the one divorced from common sense. Physician, heal thyself.
That is exactly what the Florida Supreme Court was trying to order, and they are in fact the supreme arbiter of Florida law. I might point out that you have very strenuously disparaged the reasonability or even possibility of doing so, for nearly 3 years now, and you don’t know that basic fact? Or have you changed your mind totally now?
Certainly. But the “side” that wanted to do so is, in fact, yours. Can you not see that argument as well, or did you want that so badly as to buy their spin so totally?
With the statement that almost all identified bias was in one direction? Please.
Why the quotation marks?
I’ll ask you again: On what basis do you think this is a statistical process? You don’t count over and over, you do it once, and thoroughly, and as fairly as possible
That too seemed to be on the verge of being imposed, as clarification of the law that set the standards as “the clear intent of the voter”. The law, I remind you. The rules the game is played by. The ones the Bushies wanted to dispense with, and which you are supporting despite your claim to the exact opposite.
Then why the hell are you arguing the exact opposite?
No, that would change the nature of the decision-making process. Some number of voters would have information that was not available to others. And if that applied inconsistency to the statistical population does not occur, as one who insists on using statistical arguments inappropriately must accept, then the results will still be just as close. No, friend, a new election would create worse problems with both accuracy and legitimacy than simply counting all the ballots fairly and thoroughly the first time. But that was a nice try at attempting to seem objective.
Sam, what the hell does the word “democracy” mean to you? Quite seriously, now. What is the basic meaning of the word, and what effect should that have in the real world? Do you actually care at all about it, deep down? We’ve had enough of this lack of basic factual understanding of this case in specific and its meaning in general, combined with contempt for those who do have it, out of you, okay?
g8rguy, actually, the way it works (and perhaps Sam can use his statistical prowess to explain it to you) is that nonbiased errors do congregate about a mean, with their variances describable by terms like standard deviation and Gaussian bell curves. The more tries you take, the closer their mean gets to the true mean, and the convergence is fairly rapid, too.
Yes, I understand that, Elvis. As I said, “multiple humans are likewise; less fallible, admittedly than single humans, but fallible nevertheless.”
In other words, having more people check something is going to reduce the error. This does not mean that it eliminates error, just that it reduces it. Pretending you’ve done the former when you’ve done the latter is incorrect.
Clear now?
But if you’ve done all you reasonably can to determine the winner, in good faith, then you have a result that a democratic people can and should accept as legitimate. That’s the basis of the argument here, not the theoretical mathematical achievability of achieving a p-factor of less than .05 with sufficiently-repeated trials.
On further consideration of all of the above, let me add this:
What Tejota said, double. Well put, every word.
Quite. However, my point is that we should be aware that nevertheless, the process is imperfect, that there’s bound to be some uncertainty in your determination of the winner. What that level of uncertainty is in the case under discussion, I am not equipped to say, but to pretend that it’s zero is almost certainly naive.
To pretend that the level of uncertainty is zero is certainly naive, yes, and if I could find anyone claiming so I’d tell him that. It isn’t the standard for acceptability, though, as we seem to agree.
The claim you describe is an order of magnitude less naive, though, than pretending that two totals can be added (repetitively if you like), while susceptible to error (statistically biased or not), and can still be considered “a tie”.
Just in case you missed it.
Now, I would suggest that whenever A gets, say, x +/- (x+something) more votes than B, you cannot justifiably say that you know who the winner is, though you may have the strong suspicion that it’s A.
To be honest, I don’t know what I would do in a situation like the above. I agree that it wouldn’t be fair to redo the election (unless you redid it nationwide, which I suppose I wouldn’t object to, but which seems like a clumsy solution).
Nice hijack on the Fla. recount, but I notice nobody’s disputing the illegal disenfranchsement of tens of thousands of Dem votes by Choicepoint. Sorry, babies, it’s in the bag: the GOP subverted democracy in the Fla. election, and judging by your silence on the other issues raised, I would assume that you concede that they are subverting democracy still.
Or, Captor, the debate has moved to a different area. Your assumption is, frankly, pretty silly; surely a poster of your prominence must have discovered by now that debates stray from the original topic. It’s only slightly less than blindingly obvious, after all.