Gore wins! Now get over it.

[Jodi]

MAEGLIN:

It’s easy for you to stay high and dry: you support the winner. Evidently you don’t have quite as many problems with the right wing agenda as the losers in this election do. I can’t picture you screaming bloody murder if Gore had won, but I seriously doubt you would have taken such a high-minded position. The mud would have at least covered your toes.

Well, we don’t know (obviously) but I kind of doubt it. My concept of supporting the system if not the actual result – which I’m sure is a direct carry-over from my dedication to the justice system despite its frequent failings – probably would not allow me to attack the means (meaning, the Electoral College and the Supreme Court, not the faulty ballots) as opposed to the ends. I might not support Gore’s policies – though I very well might, I was hardly overwhelmed by either candidate – but I would attack them as policy, not as being illegitimate because he didn’t “really” win.

I have a tremendous regard for civilized discourse. Hence I believe this is the first election thread I have even posted to. However, I have not experienced the miracle of such discourse leading to good governance.

I didn’t say it led to a miracle of good governance; I said it was more likely to lead to good governance than undermining the legitimacy of the office and slinging mud.

I have a high regard for you as a debater, too, Jodi, but when I recruited my core membership for the SDMB cell of the Self-Destructing Liberal Terrorist Front, your name wasn’t on the A-list.

Ha! So my plans to eliminate your organization have failed? My masters will be most displeased.

I would not go so far as to agree with you here. Democracy depends on adhering to the rule of law which its people set for themselves.

But it is precisely the rule of law that dictates that once the election is over and the president is chosen by legitimate means – the Electoral College and the Supreme Court – we accede to his right to be president and accept him as such, loathe as we may the things he tries to do while in office.

Automatic adherence to authority . . .

I am not talking about automatic adherence to authority. I am talking about recognizing that Bush DOES in fact HAVE authority. He IS the president, and legitimately so, though under circumstances that mean he lacks any sort of meaningful mandate. This has nothing whatsoever to do with inhibiting public discourse, civil disobedience, or the rights to expression or assembly. I don’t even expect people to admit this – “Okay, I hate you, but you won” – I just expect (futilely) that people will shut up about the election now that it’s over and done, and if they hate Bush for what he stands for or is trying to do, then talk about that.

In order to be intellectually honest, I would have to be true to myself.

I disagree. I think all kinds of honesty require you to be more than true to just yourself. In particular, I think intellectual honesty requires us to recognize a fait accompli as such, and to move past things we cannot change to things we can – unless there is reason not to. To you, undermining Bush’s legitimacy is a reason not to move past the election; to me it is not. Please note that I am in no way accusing you of intellectual dishonesty, but I’m not sure we agree on precisely what that means.

HAZEL:

Jodi, I think you’re overlooking an important point. Yes, for any one single voter, we can’t know for sure what his intentions were. But we can be sure that ninty-plus percent of Gore-Buchanan double votes were intended for Gore. We know there’s no way Buchanan did substantially better in West Palm Beach then elsewhere.

No, HAZEL, we do not “know” this, because we cannot prove it. We can presume it based on what we know about he Palm Beach voters, but we cannot know it to a certainty. And we cannot award the election – or try to re-award the election at this late date – based solely on unproven and unprovable assumptions. If you think that it is objectively provable that a specific person or persons who double-punched their ballots really intended to vote for Gore, please explain how you would go about proving this.

I am mystified by the mindset that believes that if the rules are followed, the results are automatically right.

How can you follow all the rules and reach the wrong result? I am not talking about the will of the people, which by popular vote was for Gore anyway, and which in Florida was arguably so screwed up as to be indiscernable. I am talking about utilizing the mechanisms in place for dealing with such problems – the courts and the Electoral College – and allowing them to sort the matter out precisely as they were intended to. Even if you don’t like the results, how can you say they were “wrong”?

Instead of trying to claim that the result was not a miscarriage of justice.

I think it is not to much to ask that people acknowledge that many of us do NOT believe the result was a miscarriage of justice. You do not have to agree with my characterization, but then neither do I have to agree with yours.

[Hazel]

Jodi said, "According to the certified election results Gore and 50,456,062 for Bush – or a little more that 1/2 million votes out of 101.5 million votes cast. If my math is correct, that’s a margin of around one-half of one percent. You do the math on that and then get back to me on how you can construe it as ‘not all that close.’ "

Yes, the popular vote results were close, but IMHO there is no real doubt that Gore came out ahead. In Florida, OTOH, the official results had Bush winning by 537 votes out of approx 6 million cast. That’s one one-hundredth of one percent. The counting error is greater then that. Statistically, the FL results were a tie.

[Jodi]

HAZEL:

Yes, the popular vote results were close, but IMHO there is no real doubt that Gore came out ahead. In Florida, OTOH, the official results had Bush winning by 537 votes out of approx 6 million cast. That’s one one-hundredth of one percent. The counting error is greater then that. Statistically, the FL results were a tie.

Okay. And . . . ? Let’s accept for the sake of argument that the results in Florida were a dead die. Then what happens?

[minty_green]

You flip a coin.

[sub]Or was that the law in New Mexico…[/sub]

[Hazel]

*Originally posted by Jodi *
**HAZEL:

Yes, the popular vote results were close, but IMHO there is no real doubt that Gore came out ahead. In Florida, OTOH, the official results had Bush winning by 537 votes out of approx 6 million cast. That’s one one-hundredth of one percent. The counting error is greater then that. Statistically, the FL results were a tie.

Okay. And . . . ? Let’s accept for the sake of argument that the results in Florida were a dead die. Then what happens? **

Ignore for the moment all the other problems with Florida’s election, and focus on the fact that the official result was a statistical tie. The inevitable margin of error in counting 6 million votes was more then the spread between the two front runners (1/100 of one percent). There was no possible way to determine who really won. One possible solution would have been to disallow Florida. Just leave it out. Another would have been to split Florida’s electoral votes between Bush and Gore.

For the 2000 election, no doubt these are solutions that the rules did not permit. But it seems plain that we need to reform our methods of conducting elections. Perhaps one of the things we need to do is write some new rules that address the question of what one does when an election results in a statistical tie.

Or we could eliminate the winner-take-all aspect of the Electoral College. Right now, 48 states are winner-take-all; two are not. Any of the other 48 can, if they so choose, change to apportioning the electoral votes according to the election results.

There is nothing to be done re the 2000 election. I’m still focused on it because I believe that we need to establish exactly what happened and why, and we need to face up to our electoral problems. If we are to solve these problems, we need to (a) admit they exist, and (b) analyize them.

By the way, I don’t think the 2000 election was settled according to the intentions of the founders. Their intention was that disputed elections be settled by Congress (a large elected body), not by the courts (small appointed bodies).

[Stoid]

elucidator puts everything very well. He does, after all, elucidate.

That’s why he’s my hero.

stoid

[Hazel]

Jodi asks, “How can you follow all the rules and reach the wrong result?”

I ask, how can you even ASK!?

Rules are created by falible humans. Following the rules does not always produce the intended results. Unforseen situations arise. Unusual complications crop up. Put the 2000 election out of your mind for the moment, and consider this as a general question. To me, it seems utterly plain that “following all the rules” does not guarentee a right result. Even if the rules were written with the best possible intentions.

It seem to me that the proper objective is not to follow all the rules blindly, regardless of consequences. The proper objective is to determine what is right and try to find a way to achieve the right result; the just result; the fair result. If rules get in the way, the proper thing is to try to find a way to do what’s right dispite the rules. This is not always possible, but it should be the objective.

Returning to the 2000 election now-- In the aftermath of this botched election, I think we need to take a close look at everything that went wrong (in every state, not just in Florida) with an eye to improving both the methodology of – AND the rules governing – elections.

In some cases, improving the methodology will preclude the need to improve the rules. Rather then write new rules to try to avoid the problems that resulted from the use of punchcards, and of butterfly ballots, I would prefer to quit using punchcards and butterflys.

[Hazel]

http://www.commondreams.org/views/113000-101.htm
Published on November 30, 2000 in the Boston Globe-- “Indecision 2000: Heads or Tails?” by Stephen Jay Gould

And a quote from the article:

“We can count for every metaphor of eternity, until Kingdom Come, hell freezes over, or the cows come home, and we will never know because the vote is tied by any achievable standard of measurement. Any method, machine or human, ineluctably embodies an intrinsic margin of error. Differences smaller than this margin cannot be resolved, and any contest with a measured difference within this range is a tie. The disparity between Bush and Gore in Florida lies well within this range - not even near an outer edge that might be tweaked by special care - using any method of machine or hand counting. To cite the excellent metaphor presented by J.A. Paulos in the New York Times, any attempt to determine whether Bush or Gore won Florida is equivalent to trying to measure a bacterium with a yardstick.”

(I think J.A. Paulos is the guy who wrote “Innumeracy” and “A Mathmeticial Reads the Newspaper”)