When the ruling came down to begin the manual recount, and include some discarded ballots, that gap closed between Gore and Bush to 154. Now that the manual recount is under way, Bush has begun to recoup those lost votes, the unnoffical tally now stands at 193.
What indication does Gore have that a manual recount is going to win him the election? Consdidering machine ballots say he lost?
(MPSIMS? GQ? I’ll toss a coin.)
As he keeps saying, Gore just wants to count all the votes. Winning isn’t his main concern.
Bwahahahahahahahaha!! 
No… Serously… I think part of the reason is that the older voting systems, which are more likely to produce “undervotes” that can’t be read by the vote-counting machines, are in voting precincts whose demographics favor the Democrats. Plus, he has nothing to lose, right? In the same way, Bush had nothing to gain by agreeing to manual recounts, statewide or in any other fashion, at any point after the machine recount was done.
The funny part about all of this is that if Gore had won the first count by 500 votes, their roles would probably be reversed.
malden said:
I don’t think there’s any “probably” about it.
(I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret. Despite the fact that I voted for Bush and think the Dems’ manuverings constitute trying to change the rules of the game after it’s over, I’m kind of enjoyingall this. Politics used to be entertainment, back when other sources of entertainment were few and far between…and now it is again. A combination soap opera and circus, complete with clowns.)
Know what?
I for one am just happy that they are actually going to count the votes again.
Given the fact that when Bush was governor of Texas he instituted a law that if there was a less than 1% difference in vote counts, it would be required BY LAW that there be a recount.
Since that is obviously the case in THIS situation, what leg does he have to stand on in disputing it?
And yes, before you ask, I voted for Gore. But I ask you to trust me on this…I would feel the same regardless of who thought they had won.
I want to know the truth, whatever it is.
(MysterE, we have found our first huge area of disagreement. What say we spend the rest of our lives cancelling out each others votes? :))
We decided a while back that any election threads were going to be shuffled off to Great Debates, so off it goes!
Don’t get a false sense of security from the initial results, Ablett.
Many more ballots are going into a “disputed” pile than are being counted definitively for Gore or Bush.
These are the ballots that the county board of canvassars evaluate when all the others are counted and make a final determination.
These are the ballots that the Broward canvassing board gave votes to Gore with like a conveyor belt a couple of Saturdays ago, virtually all of which came on a 2-1 vote by the canvassars, the two Democratic canvassars ruling the day.
One person’s “counting the votes” is another person’s “manufacturing what you need to win.”
He hopes that he just happens to win based upon the votes that were not clearly balloted one way or another.
Lets say that there is the true value (mu) and each recount will provide something close to this value but not exactly there, a normal sampling distribution. He hopes to either get a result that disproves the null hypothesis (the first machine count) to either prove himself as the winner (basically impossible) or cast enough doubt and confusion to prevent Florida from sending a group of electors (unlikely) to Washington.
He doesn’t have much of a chance, but it is the only chance he’s got.
I was set to reply, and then threemae pinned it down. Sure, even if there’s a manual recount, he may lose, but if there’s no recount, he definitely loses.
Everybody lost way back when the primaries were over. Neither of these candidates is the best one. Hell, neither of these candidates is really a good one. Gore’s a robotic prig, Bush is a jock fratboy. I’m still hoping (with my usual realization that it would take a sudden outbreak of career-terminal common sense) that the Electoral College will make an en masse protest vote for John McCain.
Look, we are talking about Bush having a 100 vote lead now. So, assuming the state was precisely 50/50, then if there are 10,000 new votes, the chances are that one or the other will get 100+ more that the other, considering the margin or error. If Bush gets them- oh, well, what has Gore lost? If Gore gets them, he wins. The chance is a trifle bit better than 50/50 for Gore- pretty damn good odds, if you ask me.
Suppose a football puts forth his opinion that touchdowns should be worth 10 points instead of 7. And suppose that that player’s team gets two touchdowns and three field goals, while their opponent gets three touchdowns and no field goals. Would you say that, because the player supported touchdowns being 10 points, his team should be declared the loser?
jayjay
Why is it “common sense” to vote for an anti-gay, anti-abortion rights, anti-first amendment hypocrite?
Scotticher said:
Since we’re not in the same state, we didn’t actually cancel out each other’s votes. I’ll forgive you for being wrong about the election, however.
The Ryan said:
I think a sentient football just might get people’s minds off the election.
I think that in this case, it very clearly the poster’s intent to have the word “player” after the word “football”. And we all know it’s intent that matters…
Florida was recounted because it was less than .5% so it was recounted. Bush won that. Bush is disputing the manual recounts, not the machine recount.