How about we treat the recount as a learning opportunity? Suppose every vote is hand counted and we get within a few hundred of what we thought on election night. Wouldn’t that be good to know? I’ll discount Pennsylvania with its deliberately unauditable system, but if MI and WI do a hand recount, that would give us a good idea of just how many votes we might expect a hand recount to flip. Is it a few hundred? Few thousand? More? With this information, we can get a decent feel for how close a race needs to be before a recount could alter the result. Also, maybe we’ll learn some shortcomings in the vote counting processes for election night and figure out how to fix them.
Liberals pre-election: “Voting fraud doesn’t happen (should I bump some threads?), and it’s an egregious attack on our Democracy to not accept the results of the election!”
Liberals post-election: "Not my President! Rigged! Recount! What’s wrong with auditing the vote? "
You guys can’t even hold a single position for over a month. As it is, nothing will come of it. At this point, just let it go and accept Trump will be President.
What we learned in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 is that elections can be stolen. Not the way that Republicans thing (in-person voter impersonation, which is the least efficient way to do it). What is absolutely retarded is for a candidate to win the electoral vote and then insist that election fraud denied him the popular vote victory.
They aren’t going to do a hand recount in WI at least.
:shrugs: If Stein and the libs want to waste money on this, I have no objection, as the taxpayer doesn’t need to pay for it. It’s not going to make any difference - the results won’t change, and the Democratic denial-fest isn’t going to be ended by anything as mundane as reality.
Regards,
Shodan
To be fair, their position is completely consistent - no election is valid if a Democrat loses.
Regards,
Shodan
I agree that the recount is an exercise in futility. The Clinton campaign, were it up to them, would not be pursuing the option. However, since it is going to happen, it is only sensible for her campaign to be involved to protect her own interests.
We already have a pretty good idea about all that. It’s not like there haven’t been plenty of recounts in the past involving the straightforward voting systems in MI&WI. So no, this is total waste of time and money.
Jill Stein is buying, and I’m of the opinion that there is never enough data.
Which are?
For the recount not to be driven by the Green Party, mostly. To ensure that it is as fair and accurate as possible, and is not hijacked by ideologues who cannot see reality in front of their face.
There can be enough data. It’s not worth it, even if JillStein is so generously buying. Or rather generously putting up other people’s money.
I think there should be recounts every so often, that way we can do trend analyses to assure ourselves that we aren’t beginning to see systemic errors that should be addressed.
I’m not sure what “systemic errors” you expect to find in Michigan’s paper ballot voting. Wisconsin does a bunch of testing of their optical scanning systems before and after an election already. Pennsylvania apparently does an automatic audit of about 2% of it’s machines post election.
If you want to test the system periodically you should enshrine it in the normal election procedures not cause all this drama and delay. You aren’t going to establish “trend lines” with sporatic recounts brought about when some random goofball gets a bee in their bonnet.
This Wisconsin Election Commission runs periodic audits of electronic voting systems per Wisconsin state law. You can see the last one was performed in 2014 and showed an inconsequential handful of irregularities. Performing a full recount is expensive and time consuming, and while Stein is paying for it (and not filling her coffers as Goldkleinfinger disingeneously suggests) it is really just an expression of protest more than a rational expectation of being able to overturn the vote even in Wisconsin, much less enough states to award the Electoral College to Clinton. That it is making Trump enraged is entertaining and has goaded him into being even more thin-skinned and egotistical than usual (insisting that there was indeed fraud that took away a popular vote win) is an esthetic plus, but irregularites are found but not sufficient to overturn the vote (and it would take a heavy preponderance of evidence to do that; see the 2000 election for precedence) it just gives Trumpeters more reason for their belief that “the system is rigged”.
The smart move is to let Trump have his way now, and then illustrate every promise he breaks, every significant lie he tells, and every bit of graft he and his family engages in. It won’t convince the die hard Trumpettes that he’s the very lying manipulator he descibes himself to be in The Art of the Deal, but it will hopefully be enough (along with selecting a viable presidential candidate in 2020) to sink Trump and those who have thrown themselves in on his swamp boat.
Stranger
You might identify a few precincts where the optical scan was misreading the ballots. Perhaps some ballots were slightly misaligned in printing, that sort of thing. There are going to be a few hundred people getting a little more Christmas money courtesy of the Stein campaign, I can’t begrudge them that.
Stranger and I just told you they already run regular tests on their optical scanners. Don’t know why you keep insisting there is anything useful about this recount.
There are a lot of voting machines and a lot of ballots printed. If the recount shows that the error rate is vanishingly small, wouldn’t that be great to know? Perhaps that would show WI and MI as the gold standards for how to run things and the other states could take a lesson from Michigan, the leaders and best.
Yes, his imaginary liberals are consistent, and consistently evil. In the real world, that was Trump’s position. He flat out said that, if he lost, it would be because of tampering or fraud.
The real life liberal position is also consistent, in that we said that a loss is not proof of anything. Nothing was said that we shouldn’t investigate possible irregularities. Only that the candidate should accept the results, which Clinton did when she conceded.
I still agree there is basically no chance there was fraud. I’ve said that before the election, and I say it now afterwards. There just isn’t a credible way for the machines to be hacked without being detected. I admit that the lack of a paper trail in Pennsylvania changes this a bit, but not enough.
I still think the system needs to be monitored, or else people will start to think they could actually get away with fraud. And we don’t need that.
[raises hand]Excuse me, but why would you assume that, given the 2 MILLION vote disparity between the popular vote and the electoral college count, that “liberals” immediately assume the vote was “rigged”? :dubious:
The 5 stages of liberal grief:
- Denial - “Not my President”
- Anger - Protest/Riots
- Bargaining - Recounts and attempts to swing Electoral Voters (We are here)
- Depression - “Goodbye, America. We’re all gonna die! WAAAAA!” (Some have made it here already)
- Acceptance - (That’ll be fun to watch)