Nah – I just wanted to see what all the political-minded folks on this board made of the news. I don’t give it too much credence myself, given the article’s lack of substantive cites and numbers, but decided to toss it out just to have something to talk about besides Osama bin Laden.
I’m enough of a realist to know that Dubya will be camped in the White House until 2005 – even if solid numbers confirming a Gore landslide in Florida were to appear tomorrow, I have no doubt the GOP would stonewall the issue to keep Bush in office (and I definitely don’t expect Dubya to have the good graces to step down). But considering the sheer magnitude of the crime – and yes, I see it as a crime, where five Conservative judges on the US Supreme Court hijacked America’s election process with an unsubstanable ruling to put their candidate into office – this is definitely not something for any true-blooded citizen to “just get over it”.
I don’t recall if they directly addressed her abuse of discretion in the 2nd decision(I am willing to take your word for it rather than to re-read it right now ), but wasn’t that a little late? Didn’t they in fact thwart (I don’t mean this to be a loaded word) her decision without directly addressing it in the first FL decision? It seems like the 2nd opinion to address it was too late and indicated a mistake was made. Plus, abuse of discretion standards are always tougher than it the person with the discretion had no assertainable reason to do so. It tends to be that the official has to have a BAD reason. That was never legally established (let’s not debate whether she was acting on behalf of Bush, because we both know the answer).
I think overall, I am comfortable agreeing with you that most everyone had their partisan hat on in this matter, or at the very least couldn’t put them entirely in the drawer.
But as anyone on the other side would tell you, “If we didn’t fight for the election, the other side would have stolen it.”
I hope that settles our debate. Agreeing to disagree and all. Please don’t make me read case law on the weekends. I like to avoid it at all costs!
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Shodan * Dearest elucidator -
I’m going to have to insist on dinner and a show before this proceeds any further.
Oh, not at all. I can read at a comfortable pace, at least until my lips get tired. It is not the blistering pace of your argument I find daunting, it is the leaps of faith required to find it plausible.
The crucial point here is that they were exit polls, people who went to the polls to vote for Gore, thought they voted for Gore, but in fact voted for Buchanan.
Hold that thought for a moment. Seems rather to contradict your Clinton/Dole conjecture. But I won’t hold you to consistency, if that makes you uncomfortable.
I make no assumptions, bland or otherwise. I have learned from grim experience that my countrymen will elect a villain and a likeable doofus to hold our lives in his hand. Bush might very well have won Florida, it was very close. But if you review the rather informed statistical analysis cited here, there is good and valid reason to suggest he did not. Repeat the mantra “recount over and over” as often as you like, that fact still remains.
Ohhh, dat debbil William Jefferson Clinton! Engaging in shady campaign practices while the Republicans virtuously maintained the pristine purity of their campaign coffers. Balderdash, sir! Tommyrot!
We both know that no virgin is elected Queen of the Harlots, best to let the whole campaign finance question lie like the proverbial sleeping jackal.
One of the aforementioned audacious leaps of faith. I will do you the credit of assuming that this is in jest, lest I am impelled to examine your boots. (In truth, I would almost have preferred to see him President than to have to witness him publicly discussing his unfortunate loss of pecker-rigor.)
If you would be so kind as to refrain from suggesting that you can read my mind? Thank you.
The Evil Hypnotic “Recount” Mantra! Curses! Must resist…brain going numb…hogwash becoming plausible…AAAAAaaarrgh!
It is my contention that if the voters of Florida had had thier votes enumerated precisely as they intended at the polls, Al Gore would be President. Now, if for any reason you wish to contend on that, I stand ready to respond.
I will stop here, no need for us to engage in dueling barnyard methaphor.
Please don’t do that any more. I fear I may have dreams of Peggy Noonan, diaphonously attired, which would compel me to extremes of chemical behavior I have long forsworn. “The horror…the horror…”
Sigh. See, this is the stuff that is completely unhelpful. For this statement to stand, you need to: A) Describe how a Supreme Court’s decision was a ‘crime’. Not just inconsistent, not just partisan, but a CRIME. B) How this decision ‘put their candidate in office’. Let’s say the Supreme Court was composed of 9 clones of Stephen Breyer, and had voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Florida Supreme Court. HOW does Gore become President? Please explain. In detail. What scenario do you envision that has Al Gore being President of the United States today?
If you can’t come up with one, then Bush IS the legitimate holder of the office, even if SCOTUS was wrong, and all their decision did was save us all a few days or weeks of hassle. Based on what we know now, the Supreme Court decision was COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT in decided who became President. Bush would have won no matter which way their decision went. I don’t know how you get around that.
See, this game of ‘who was more disenfranchised by voter exclusion or shoddy ballot designs’ is a great issue to debate BEFORE an election, but it’s simply not right to try and bring these factors into play AFTER the election.
Let me give you an example: Democrats have often favored ‘busing’ voters into polling places, on the theory that the poorest people are the least likely to be able to easily get to a voting place, and are also most likely to vote Democratic. And it’s actually not a bad idea. And if you were to bring that issue up for the next election, I’d probably agree with it even though it would probably hurt Republicans.
HOWEVER, if you held an election tomorrow, and your guy lost by 500 votes, it would be totally inappropriate to say, “Hey! We should have won! There are at least 500 people out there who wanted to vote Democrat who couldn’t get to the polls! So let’s get a bus and go round them up now and see if we can’t push our guy over the top.”
That’s the problem Republicans have with all this ‘stolen election’ rhetoric. The rules may be flawed, the ballots may have been flawed, but THOSE WERE THE RULES by which the election was to be held. And by that standard, Bush won. The LEGAL way. He is the rightful owner of the title.
If Gore had managed to gain the Presidency by having specific Democratic counties recounted (and not Republican counties), then it would be much easier to make the claim that HE ‘stole’ the election. Which is why the Supreme Court invoked the equal protection clause in the first place.
I think it was just a better written decision. The first had been dashed off in a hurry. As you may recall the second decision only needed to excise any reference to the Florida constitution and any silliness about respecting the right have your vote count. These references were unnecessary to the decision in any case. The fundamental rational of both decisions was that she failed to exercise her discretion in a principled manner and failed to consider relevant factors in her decision.
Glad to see that you actually acknowledge that her actions were partisan. I do have to disagree with your assesment that this was rampant on both sides however. I cannot think of a democratic leaning authority who acted in such a blatantly partisan manner. The counter examples are numerous.
Sigh. See, this is the stuff that is completely unhelpful. For this statement to stand, you need to: A) Describe how a Supreme Court’s decision was a ‘crime’. Not just inconsistent, not just partisan, but a CRIME. B) How this decision ‘put their candidate in office’. Let’s say the Supreme Court was composed of 9 clones of Stephen Breyer, and had voted overwhelmingly in favor of the Florida Supreme Court. HOW does Gore become President? Please explain. In detail. What scenario do you envision that has Al Gore being President of the United States today?
If you can’t come up with one, then Bush IS the legitimate holder of the office, even if SCOTUS was wrong, and all their decision did was save us all a few days or weeks of hassle. Based on what we know now, the Supreme Court decision was COMPLETELY IRRELEVANT in decided who became President. Bush would have won no matter which way their decision went. I don’t know how you get around that.
See, this game of ‘who was more disenfranchised by voter exclusion or shoddy ballot designs’ is a great issue to debate BEFORE an election, but it’s simply not right to try and bring these factors into play AFTER the election.
Let me give you an example: Democrats have often favored ‘busing’ voters into polling places, on the theory that the poorest people are the least likely to be able to easily get to a voting place, and are also most likely to vote Democratic. And it’s actually not a bad idea. And if you were to bring that issue up for the next election, I’d probably agree with it even though it would probably hurt Republicans.
HOWEVER, if you held an election tomorrow, and your guy lost by 500 votes, it would be totally inappropriate to say, “Hey! We should have won! There are at least 500 people out there who wanted to vote Democrat who couldn’t get to the polls! So let’s get a bus and go round them up now and see if we can’t push our guy over the top.”
That’s the problem Republicans have with all this ‘stolen election’ rhetoric. The rules may be flawed, the ballots may have been flawed, but THOSE WERE THE RULES by which the election was to be held. And by that standard, Bush won. The LEGAL way. He is the rightful owner of the title.
If Gore had managed to gain the Presidency by having specific Democratic counties recounted (and not Republican counties), then it would be much easier to make the claim that HE ‘stole’ the election. Which is why the Supreme Court invoked the equal protection clause in the first place.
Of course not. Wherever did you get such a silly idea? Why is she suddenly not permitted to act as she believes? What other political figures are to be forced into giving up their beliefs and viewpoints? Last I heard, the people elect people whose political beliefs are similar to their own… so if Mrs. (Ms.?) Harris had acted “objectively” and “non-partisanly”, she would not have been fulfilling the desires of the people who elected her into office. After all, if all political figures are meant to be “non-partisan”, we wouldn’t have any political parties, would we?
Never heard of him, nor (I’m guessing) he of me. But we’ve clearly both seen the Marx Brothers movie Duck Soup, in which Groucho’s character was Rufus T. Firefly, President of Freedonia:
“The last man nearly ruined this place,
he didn’t know what to do with it;
if you think this country’s bad off now,
just wait 'til I get through with it.”
Cogently stated, Sam, as far as you go (except for that digression into the “busing” analogy, which weakens an otherwise well-reasoned post) But you stop a bit short, here and there.
You rest considerable weight on the “rules are rules, the law is the law”, but are a rather selective, as were the 'Pubs in this instance.
Numero uno: the military absentee ballots. Now, if the letter of the law is to be followed, those ballots which were, for whatever innocent reason, incorrectly corrected and submitted, would have been discounted. I do not recall the 'Pubs taking that stance, seems to me they rushed to the microphones to wrap themselves in patriotic fervor and blubber about “our brave soldiers” being denied the right to vote. Gore/Lieberman, in a typical Dem reluctance to play down 'n dirty hardball, conceded that point. However, that was not theirs to concede, if, as you say, the “law is the law”.
Numero Two-o A great many voters who were legally registered, qualified, etc. who showed up to vote were denied that right. The overwhelming majority of those occured amongst the black, the poor, etc. I am sure you find this as appalling a failure as do I, those persons were as surely denied their right to vote as would the service personnell have been had the letter of the law been followed Did you see any 'Pubs rushing to the microphone for them? I thought not.
What law is it that states that a person who was wrongfully denied thier rights cannot be afforded a compensatory opportunity to vote? There certainly was plenty of time to implement such a remedy, as things turned out. As I recall, that idea was lumped together contemptously within the “recount and recount and recount” mantra. Would this have thrown the election to Gore? Very likely. Is this a blatant, hardball political hypocrisy? You betcha!
But, even if this solution falls outside the letter of the law, it is apparent, is it not, that bending the law to suit one set of voters (decidedly conservative) is deemed a patriotic duty, whereas bending it for another set [decidedly liberal} would be an assault on the rule of law. Steaming, flaming hypocrisy? Oh, yeah.
You asked for one, count 'em, one plausible scenario wherein Al Gore wins the White House. You got it.
For about the last eon - prior to last November, anyway - it was generally conceded to be a problem. Almost no one claimed that the will of a majority of the EC was inherently superior to the will of a plurality of the electorate, and pretty much everyone conceded that we were lucky that they had agreed in every election since the late 19th Century, but that there would be hell to pay, the first time they disagreed.
The only reason that wasn’t true this time was twofold:
The party better at getting angry and staying that way was the beneficiary, rather than the victim, of the EC’s disagreement with the popular majority; and
The issues involved with Florida wound up overshadowing the EC question.
A mass conversion of the ‘Oceania was always at war with Eurasia’ sort occured on this issue within hours of the 2000 election. All of a sudden, conservatives everywhere, some of whom were prepared to holler bloody murder if Bush had won the popular vote and lost the EC, found the EC to be The Eighth Wonder of the World.
Pity it didn’t work the other way - if the result had been reversed, it’s odds-on that a Constitutional amendment to revise/replace the EC would have already been sent to the states.
And is there evidence that these errors were biased (if so, cite please), or were they just 100K random errors?
Because two standard deviations on the random error in 100K votes is less than 320 votes. So unless the errors were nonrandom, that’s the effect one can expect them to have on the popular vote.
I won’t argue with this.
Think a switch of one big state couldn’t have changed things in 1960, 1968, or 1976? 2000 was the fourth time in the past 11 Presidential elections when the election was so close that the EC votes of one state could’ve swung it. That’s not my idea of ‘historically rare’.
I read your words as saying that you thought it was a problem; I didn’t have a strong opinion one way or the other, so was tossing what seemed to be a more than adequate solution at it. But I’m willing to go along with whatever on this.
I expect most states already have clear rules on this; I guess the question is, were there instances where the rules weren’t followed, and it made a difference?
I agree that there should be clear rules, and that the rules should be enforced.
That would work too.
WRONG. The freak snowstorm in Berkeley can just as likely be a hurricane in Alabama. Weather happens, we know the possibilities, and the effects of weather on an election are fundamentally random.
Maybe over time, this one would evidence itself as random. But right now, it’s only happened once that we’re aware of, and its effect wasn’t random. And we all agree that we don’t want it to happen again.
That’s why the authors of the paper I cited looked at all 3000+ counties. Feel free to look, and make your case.
(a) That’s handwaving, not examples, and (b) variance isn’t the problem. Bias is.
I think you missed my point about variance. First, it’s not clear that something like storms would effect all parties randomly. That would only be the case if the random distribution is normal. I’m not sure that’s the case. On Nov 11, certain areas of the country are far more likely to be affected by certain events than other areas. And furthermore, the party that prepares for such eventualities would gain an intentional bias. For example, If I have a ‘get out the vote’ team in place to inform voters where to go in case power fails, then any time it does I’ll gain over the other side.
And even intentional bias can become variance, if both sides tend to engage in it equally.
I don’t think it’s fair to point out all elections in which one state could have made the difference, because the odds that California wouldn’t be won or lost by the same number of votes as Florida. But I think I did say, “Any one state”, so I’ll take the hit.
But you know what? We’re nitpicking and arguing definitions. I think we actually agree on the major points. The election was screwed, Bush got lucky, it was a very unlikely scenario.
Come on! You won’t even yield the obvious partisanship of the old ladies on the two canvassing boards (Palm Beach and the one chaired by Judge Robert E Lee…I forget the county…Broward,maybe?) I saw one where Lee, and the other guy voted for a contested ballot for Bush and she devined the intent of the voter was to vote for Gore! When she finally found a ballot that was a Bush ballot, even the DEMS in the room chuckled. Come on, man. For the loveapete! Let me hear you type that you believe THEY were partisan hacks, too!
Yeah, I knew it was from Duck Soup. I find it amusing that two people with such similar politcial viewpoints and debating tactics chose the same (well, similar) usernames based on a character from an older movie. Maybe Lee Harvey Oswald DID act alone.
Sounds like a joke to me. Check out the republican on that panel for a clearly partisan actor.
Converting the office of elections into a republican party field office, hijacking the supreme court, accepting clearly unlawful ballots under pressure from republican lawyers and disenfranchising voters when it was known that the lists were faulty to name a few examples were not jokes.
You mean disenfranchsiing thousands of Florida votes and arbitrarily declaring one candidate to be the winner of a presidential election without a manual recount of the ballots doesn’t appear to be a crime to you?
Full manual recount of the Florida ballots, as dictated by Florida election law. Period. The one thing which the Bush campaign consistently stonewalled against, to the point of bussing in “protesters” from Washington DC to shut down the recount efforts.
Huh? From where did you draw this brilliant piece of reasoning from, pray tell?
Again, Florida election law requires a full manual recount of the ballots in question to resolve a disputed election result. Gore petitioned repeatedly to have the recounts done, but NEVER GOT IT (because the USSC stopped the recount effort, then deemed it moot). That is obviously and blatantly illegal.
But I suppose, Sam, this doesn’t matter to you, since your candidate “won,” eh?
(And as I’ve said before on countless occassions, pick up a copy of Vincent Bugliosi’s The Betrayal of America for a layman’s explaination of why the USSC ruling was a major cluster-f**k and a disgrace of the highest order)
), but wasn’t that a little late? Didn’t they in fact thwart (I don’t mean this to be a loaded word) her decision without directly addressing it in the first FL decision? It seems like the 2nd opinion to address it was too late and indicated a mistake was made. Plus, abuse of discretion standards are always tougher than it the person with the discretion had no assertainable reason to do so. It tends to be that the official has to have a BAD reason. That was never legally established (let’s not debate whether she was acting on behalf of Bush, because we both know the answer).