And while we’re at it, why not take a swipe at the source of that error about “Whither Florida”? The source of the error was clearly due to the nature of the “exit poll”. The people being asked about thier vote most likely responded truthfully, and the reporters were fully versed in the rudiments of arithmetic. That wasn’t the problem.
In at least one notorious incident, perhaps ten thousand persons who thought they had voted for Gore had actually voted for Buchanan (the otherwise inexplicable “Jews for Buchanan” phenomenon.)
And what of the voters “cleansed” from the voting rolls by the pristinely unbiased hands of Ms. Harris’ contracted minions, who by a simply extraordinary coincidence were mostly persons of color. How many of those went to the polls to cast thier vote, very likely for Gore, only to be barred because of some ghastly coincidence of last name, etc. When “exit polled”, what do you think they said? Human nature being what it is, most likely they answered “Gore” but did not wish to embarass themselves by revealing they were barred from the polls, albeit innocently.
The “exit polls” reflected a perfectly reasonable supposition: that Al Gore had been favored in Florida, by a very slim majority.
If everyone who intended to vote for Gore on the morning of the election had actually done so, we would be mocking his pedantic and wooden persona as reflected in his Rose Garden speeches.
Gore may have attempted to steal the 2000 election, but Bush actually did steal it. Republicans are better at stealing than Democrats, which is why we are so jealous. We will never equal the record of the Reagan administration, which saw 138 of its people go to prison for fraud, corruption, influence peddling, etc. Hell, Kennedy stole the 1960 election, and nobody questioned his legitimacy. They just shot him in the head. Oops, that’s another thread.
Oh, and Bush won, by my count, 37/58(~64%) of the counties in California in 2000. Trouble was, those counties didn’t have enough voters in them. They were outvoted by the larger populations in other counties. Gore won 5,255,027/9,787,708(~54%) of the actual VOTES. So the state’s 54 electors went to Gore. Counties don’t matter. Cities don’t matter. Districts don’t matter. States only matter because of the Electoral College. A copy of the “county map” can still be found at the USA Today website. The bottom line, in any election, is the number of votes. Number of counties is irrelevant. That’s the way it should be.
Close. Let’s rephrase it - The election was screwed up and got thrown into the courts. Once there, both sides used their legal teams to try every thing they could within the law to win. Gore lost.
I notice you guys are still neglecting the fact that a consortium of newspapers and a college did a meticulous recount after the election, which took months, and discovered that A) if the recount Gore wanted had continued as he wanted it, he still would have lost, and B) a recount of the entire state would have also resulted in a Bush win in almost every scenario. There was only one combination of chad-scrutiny and recount districting that resulted in a Gore win.
But that’s an awfully inconvenent thing to have to remember, isn’t it?
Not nearly as inconvenient as the thousands of Democratic voters who were not even permitted to vote. I noticed you conveniently left them out of your justification for the Bush debacle.
Besides the improbabilty of one city in america encompassing a majority of the population, a city itself is not a 100% homologous voice. Here in San Francisco we have plenty of Republicans (yes, PLENTY of Republicans…in SAN FRANCISCO…shocking, i know). I’ve never understood the argument that “the cites might take over” when the cities’ opinions vary depending on their location, plus the cities never speak as a unified voice. And the electoral collage is just a reflection of what cities are in the state. California has a lot because it has some huge freaking cities. Ditto with new york, texas, and illinois. What is the difference in the argument that makes one right and one wrong? Why is the majority on the state level (and county level as witnessed here)good while at the city level bad? What is wrong with cities?
You offer many plausible scenarios. Plausible, but not proveable. In the end, we have only the actual votes themselves. And the many, many recount scenarios, as Sam mentioned, that showed Bush the winner. That is the only result an objective person can look at, after the fact.
As for how certain people “intended to vote”-- it’s really beside the point. I’m sure we all remember seeing the “horrible” butterfly ballot on the internet in the days after the election. It was really pretty simple. I have trouble shedding tears for anyone who might have lost their vote because he or she couldn’t match up a name with a punch hole.
Quite frankly I think the Electoral College is crap because it forces Presidential candidates to pander to local issues too much. They can’t outline a single plan for the country as a whole and then get elected or not based on that plan. They are forced into campaigning for constituents on a state-by-state basis even though, if elected, their constitutents won’t be broken down like that. I can’t imagine how much doubletalk and bullshit they’d have to spout if they were expected to fight for blocks of votes(a la the electoral college) on a city-by-city basis. I think the President, as the only nationally-elected office, should not have to change his campaign speeches as he travels from place to place. His platform should be one which is constant from state to state. If enough people, nationwide, support his vision for the nation, then he gets elected. Screw this “winning a state” nonsense. You win the nation, you lead the nation. That’s the way I feel it should work. There are plenty of other avenues for lower-population states to get representation. Let the President be elected at large because he’s going to serve the at-large constituency.
No one is suggesting that you shed tears, John, merely recognize the fact as given: that had the votes been counted in the way the voters had intended, Gore would have one. Hence, it follows that the will of the voters has been thwarted.
And do you remember that statesmanlike speech GeeDubya gave, in that he recognized the marginal legitimacy of his election, and promised to govern in a way mindful of his lack of anything resembling a “mandate”?
The only fact is that neither you nor I can read minds and will never actually know how many votes, on both sides of the aisle, were cast in error. In the face of that, the only reasonable (ie, non-partisan) approach is to accept the votes as they are. If someone has taken a case to court and proven that votes were cast in error, or if an election official has been convicted of wrong doing, pls elucidate us regarding that information.
As for Bush’s speach. So what? I could just as easily say that the 2002 election gave him the mandate he missed the first time around. But I don’t realy give much attention to mandates. The only thing a mandate means is that the other side should cooperate more fully-- lest they get ousted at the next opportunity. I fully expect a Dem or Pub to push for his/her full agenda once in office. Someone who deliberately compromises his beliefs has no respect in my mind.
However, if you wish to advise the next Dem elected president to govern mindful of the wishes of the opposition, go ahead. But I won’t hold my breath on that one.
I was pleasantly surprised to find that Razorsharp’s historical analysis was mostly accurate. I guess I was underestimating him. There are some rhetorical flourishes which are opinion rather than fact ( such as the extra electoral strength granted the smaller states was their due, for instance ) but mainly it is accurate at least so far as it deals with the past.
The main exception is in intent. Overall it is easy to fall into the misconception that each provision of the Constitution had a single agreed upon reason behind it but unfortunately things aren’t that simple. The Framers spent more time disagreeing than otherwise and the document should be viewed as a composite of many different intents. No one argued longer against state equality in the Senate than James Madison and James Wilson, for example.
Specifically, intent is impossible to decipher when it comes to the Electoral College. To claim that it is working as designed or offering it as an example of the wisdom of its creators is just plain silly. No debate lasted longer than that over how to choose the national executive. There were many reasons to settle upon an electoral college, including a desire to just settle the matter so the delegates could get back home. Thornton Anderson ( Creating the Constitution ) argues that the nationalists didn’t expect the electors to reach a majority after Washington retired and that the Congress would chose the rest from the candidates with the most votes in the college ( which would naturally tend to come from the large states ). If he’s right, and I think he is, then that would be the most common intent for the electoral college.
What the Framers didn’t expect was that state parties and proto-parties, already representing a Country/Court split in most states, would take the next step and become national. Country/Court became “Antifederal”/“Federal” became Jeffersonian Republican/Federalist. National parties could organize support for candidates before the electors met turning the college into the actual election rather than just a system for nomination. At that time each elector voted for 2 men and it was possible for both of them to gain a majority. This led, as soon as the elections began to be contested, to a problem of deciding which candidate was to be president and which vice president. After going through the wringer in 1800 the twelfth amendment changing voting to one vote for president and one for vice president was pretty uncontrovertial. Given that the system created by of the Framers to pick the president lasted less than 2 decades it is hard to argue 2 centuries later that the electoral college is a testament to their timeless wisdom.
Now that’s just stupid. One doesn’t need to read minds to know that most of the spoiled ballots were intended to be Gore votes.
One only needs to undertand statistical methods.
A little facility with math tells us not only that Gore was the choice of the people by a clear margin. But that we can say with 99.999999% certainty that he was their choice by a margin of 1000 votes. (and with 99% certainty that he was their choice by 10,000 votes, etc…).
Math is a wonderful thing. Unfortunately, it’s not valid in a court of law. But there is simply no doubt that a fair and fairly counted election would have made Gore the President.
Anyone who says otherwise is either bad at math,
or a liar.
Oh, and Incidently, John Lott is one of the liars.
First, the Electoral College would protect the integrity of the Presidency by limiting the influence of those who do not possess the faculties required to decipher the intricacies of a “butterfly ballot”.
Your statement that “Math… it’s not valid in a court of law”, sums up the accuracy of your entire conjecture. Math most certainly is valid in a court of law, so don’t even think of calling someone else a liar. As Sam Stone so correctly pointed out:
Anyways, Californians are a funny bunch when it comes to voting. For example, they’ll vote for a measure, such as Proposition 187, and turn right around and vote for a candidate whose political philosophy is contrary to the premise of the measure they just voted for.
When the mass of men are lured by corporate advertising into doing various unhealthy stuff, whether it’s smoking cancer sticks or eating McCloggedArtery Burgers, the conservative types always say, “it’s the individual responsibility of each person not to smoke/eat/do whatever that’s bad for them,” absolving Philip Morris, MickeyD’s, et al, from any responsibility for the consequences of their persuasion.
But they’re seemingly making an exception of voters in the FL Panhandle, when subjected to the words of Dan Rather.
So what is it, guys? Does responsibility solely vest in the recipient of the message? Or is the purveyor of the message also at fault for what he/she/it persuades people to do?
Not really. From Day 1, the #1 point of my brief against the conduct of the election has been the misleading ballots, especially the infamous butterfly ballot of Palm Beach County, but also the two-page Presidential ballot (instructions: “punch every page”) of Duval County.
Though the disenfranchisement of blacks who had similar names to felons, which Tars Tarkas pointed out, is point #1a these days. It’s kinda silly to say, “Bush won a majority of FL votes, so there” when Katherine Harris and the private firm she hired prevented hundreds of people from having the opportunity to vote in the first place.
Actually, both of your logic is wrong. If the network news announces that Gore has won a state, they should be stating it with scientific certainty. An example of this would be that the number of voters who have not voted yet is less than the number of votes needed to overcome the deficit. Therefore, it wouldn’t matter if the polls were still open or not.
The fact that the network news accounced this AS FACT, led most people to assume that it was true, and figured that their vote wouldn’t matter either way.
Not really, especially after the Clinton/Gore pet project of Citizenship USA, which was designed to expidite the citizenship of one million aliens, of both the legal and illegal persuasion and many with criminal records, for the purpose of changing the political demographics of regions of America in order to gain legislative seats sympathetic to the Democratic party’s political agenda.
One of the most notable gains for the Democratic party was the election of Loretta Sanchez over encumbent Bob Dornan, who had been a political thorn in the side of Clinton/Gore.
Funny thing about Loretta Sanchez, before running for congress, she was known as Loretta Brixey. She reverted to her maiden name for the purpose of garnering the “Hispanic” vote.
Now, I ask you, is it not equally rascist to vote for a candidate based solely on that candidates race as it is to vote against a candidate because of his or her race?
Imputing a moral equivalency to the 2 parties’ efforts that is not based on the evidence. It also asks for those of us, on any side, who care about the meaning of democracy to simply dismiss it rather than learn from it. Screw that.
If 2 of 5 constitutes “almost every” - is that fuzzy math again? Read. learn. Fight ignorance. Of course, the vote that counted was 5-4 Bush.