This has always amused me. At some point, we know that actual votes are subject to significant error, and more importantly, oftentime error that is heavily biased in such a way as to hurt one candidate much more than the other. Given this, it would seem that statistical sampling would provide a MUCH more accurate way of conducting elections, not only because a properly EPSEM drawn sample would have a much tighter confidence interval, but would be a lot more fair. Yet, I bet if we did such a thing, people would feel incredsibly disenfranchised and hoodwinked.
Look, please, let’s not make this thread about whether Gore or Bush should be president right now, or which one would have won if the votes had been fairly counted, or differently counted, or counted without the Supreme Court’s intervention. We’ve already had many, many threads on that, and rightly so. But for purposes of this thread, the important thing is that in his movie, Moore got the facts right to the extent that he presented them. What more is there to discuss, that is relevant to the OP?
bnorton, I am generally willing to buy that, except that I am having a hard time reconciling the concept of “recount” with the method described under your Scenario #1. Specifically, it is a statewide count of a subset of votes not previously counted, no? I don’t mean to pick nits, but is this really a recount?
And just like Moore, you are wrong.
Presuming the following was stated in the movie: (from the OP)
That statement has been disproven. As in, ‘not factually accurate’. Wrong.
The quote in the OP was
Bolding mine. It was a paraphrase by bnorton that’s been corrected.
duality72 gave the exact quote:
JEFFREY TOBIN: If there was a statewide recount, under every scenario, Gore won the election.
Moore and BrainGlutton both got the facts right.
So you don’t agree with bnorton’s scenario #1?
I misread it, but was concerned more with the paraphrase being called “not factually correct” when all it was was a paraphrase. Never mind.
For the record, the correct quote is the one provided by **duality72 **:
*JEFFREY TOBIN: If there was a statewide recount, under every scenario, Gore won the election. *
The quote in the OP was from my memory, is not correct, and should not be used to determine the truthfulness of the film.
Also for the record, I voted for Gore, despise Bush and loved the film.
Given all that, and trying to be intellectually honest, I can’t reconcile Toobin’s quote with the facts as presented in Elvis1Lives’ link. If you can, I’d like to see how you do it.
I think the point is, it’s difficult to accuse Moore of lying when what the film shows is news footage of someone saying the quote in question (and a pan across a NYT headline). At worst, he’s misleading by proxy.
That’s still a lie to me.
I think HtB nails it by pointing out scenario 1 doesn’t appear to be a statewide recount any more than scenario 2; both apply only to subsets of all votes cast. Only scenario 3 and 4 seem intended to actually review all votes.
I’d also have to agree with Askia; any recount that didn’t include overvotes is a sham.
duality72:
There was a recount mandated in Florida law based on the closeness of the vote, and it came out to Bush’s advantage. It’s the additional, non-mandated (but Gore-requested) recounts that were at issue.
Let’s not confuse two different things here.
Scenarios 3 and 4 also only look at a certain subset of the ballots - those with hanging chads and those with write-ins (overvotes).
Not if he was fooled by an incorrect headline, in which case he’s simply wrong. If he knew it was an incorrect headline, then he was indeed lying though.
By that standard, we can also accuse all the newspapers which ran the same results with “Recount Shows Bush Would Have Won” headlines as being liars as well, n’est pas? Because IIRC, there were a lot of folks who took those headlines as “proof” that Bush had won Florida legitimately…
Before we all go shooting spitwads in the dark, perhaps we better understand the foundation for Toobin’s assertion. Has anyone here read his book, IIRC, Too Close To Call?
That’s not quite the way I read those scenarios in the summary, but I’ll grant it’s not completely clear. From the above linked summary, it seems to say that scenario 3 applies a new standard for determing marginal ballots while recounting all ballots. Scenario 4 includes recounting all ballots as well as overvotes.
I did say a complete recount. It’s quite a stretch to call the supposed recount (many counties just ran their ballots through the machines again) adequate.
I’m still trying to wrap my mind around the idea that because Toobin misspoke, Moore lied.
Okay, so Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Rice, et al – all of them are quoted in F911 making statements that are not factually true. Do their misstatements make Moore a liar as well?
No. It makes him a director who included the quotes in his film, providing them for us to use in forming an opinion.
I think focusing on one statement by Toobin in order to “prove” Moore is wrong about Election 2000 is vastly overstating its importance in the movie, and (by extension) ignoring the real issue that Moore concentrated on in the opening segment – the egregious disenfranchisement of thousands of minority voters who never even had the chance to cast their ballot.
How can one forget the sight of dozens of African American Representatives, one after another, bringing forth their petitions objecting to the vote ratification, but unable to get a single Senator to sign the document (as required)? How they all had to say, “I have a petition here signed by X thousand people objecting to this in writing, but it is not signed by a Senator.”
I will forever love Maxine Waters for her statement: “The objection is in writing, and I don’t CARE if it’s not signed by a Senator.” God, how I felt her anger. I still feel it, four years later.
I have bolded the parts y’all seem to be missing. This doesn’t refer to a complete recount only to the undervotes ( where the machine doesn’t register any vote for president ). There were many ways to find your way to a Bush victory, as long as you left some ballots uncounted.
I don’t know why Elvis’s link is softpedalling the info but I distinctly remember when the big recount hit the presses after 9/11. The headline was invariably something like “Bush Still Wins” but the actual data showed that if the same standard for counting votes was applied to every ballot in Florida then Gore would win. Some standards brought Bush closer but none ever got him over the hump. Bush won because there never was a complete count using a uniform standard.
Not sure what you’re getting at here… My point was putting forth references you know to be false is lying; but if you believe those sources, then you’re just wrong.