I do not think so. He may win the battle, but he already lost the war. If he is appointed president, how is he going to deal with bitter hostile Republican Congress? They would try to oppose him just out of spite.
He might have won technically, by popular majority. But rules are rules. The Constitution requires the Electoral College. We may change the Constitution, it withstood many amendments, it can take another one. But not retroactively.The only thing Algore is digging, is a deeeeeeeeeeeep political grave.
And what’s the matter with the recount? I ain’t a mathematician, I hope there is one around these BBs who will explain it better, but I know that no matter what you count and how, there will be an error. Which increases with each counting. If you count your money once, you get one million. If you count it again… You got it. Of course, if you count something one hundred times, you are more sure that the count is right. But we can afford one hundred times. And doing manual count after mechanical one is like recalculating satellite orbit by hand after computer-calculated orbit was slightly off. It’s sooo saaad.
If I liked GWB more, I’d wished he manly and gracefully stepped aside and offered the whiner the presidency - nothing good will come out of it anyway. But nice gestures will not help GBW either. It a loose-loose situation. Only lawyer win.
Or…to use an analogy from where I work…to have a human being review an image in order to identify the human faces in it vs. trying to get a computer to do it! See, you can make the analogies work out any way you want.
The thing about mechanical counts is they can be done quickly and much less labor-intensively to a high enough degree of accuracy for most elections. When the election comes down to a few hundred votes out of 6 million cast and some of the ballots involved are these silly punchcard things where the machine seems particularly confused by hanging chads, then it seems one should be able to get a more accurate count by hand.
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I’m hijacking the thread. Why the heck can’t people type Al Gore instead of Algore? I see Algore written a lot and I was just wondering if it meant anything. I can’t stand Gore but this Algore thing is really bugging the hell out of me.
Marc
Sorry Mark. http://www.algore.com is advertised by Hon. Al Gore himself. I click it all day long. Got into habit. Perhaps he does not mind, just to be elected… anything goes…
I guess that’s what any of these “Bush Wins/Gore Wins” debates comes down to: How accurate are these counts? Logic and precendent seems to hold that machines would be more accurate, especially when dealing with huge numbers of objects that are designed to be counted by machine (a la Scantron sheets used in school). However, common sense dictates that human senses can notice ballot selections that a machine might miss.
I’m willing to go along with this manual counting, but if there’s a huge discrepancy among the finalized ballots, or if the Gore camp insists on another recount afterwards, then I’m going to start getting hostile towards it.
Without getting into the politics, I would have to say that the first analogy was more accurate. The reasons that human faces are more readily identified by humans is not that computers are ill-suited to the task, but that the mathematical basis for recognition is not understood. With counting ballots, a computer is far less prone to error than a human.
What I don’t understand is why the punch ballot counting machines can’t be designed to count ballots according to the law. Doesn’t seem too difficult to make a machine that can tell if any corner is detached.
Water, I thik the machines are designed to obey the law and relect folded corners and unclearly punched holes much better than biased humans can do. Without second guessing, without emotions and, most importantly, without knowing the results. If you liked analogies:
I drive to the neighboring city to visit my mom-in-law. I can’t find the right intersection and loose my highway. I return home, park my car and decide to walk, because by foot I can find my trail easy.
Where I work, the most frequent (by wide margin) cause of errors is clerical, i.e. human error. Our machines rarely make errors.
In an experiment, a large group of intelligent people were asked to copy 1800 digits. They ran the experiment many times, they could not get less than 3 copying errors. How many errors will ballot counters in FL make?
So, if the satellite orbit is not right, do not recalculate it by hand, change your program. We have to change the system, not to stupidly and wastefully to recount innocent ballots. It will only invite more abuse in the future.
But we have to change it for the next time, not to undo it now because it’s a pity to loose by 300 votes.
Besides, what if after all the ballots are counted, reshuffled and recounted, some electors will vote against Hon. Al Gore? Will he whine again?