I don’t understand you. Are you suggesting that Gore might win under a universal Palm Beach standard? Or that Bush might win under a Broward one?
ambushed:
Really? Where does it say that?
RTFirefly:
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- Read harder.
- Add better.
Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, O’Connor and Kennedy say the recount violated federal law and the Constitution. That’s five.
Souter and Breyer, in their dissents, admit there are constitutional equal protection problems with the abitrary and varying standards of the recount, but each suggests that the Florida Supreme Court be given another chance at fashioning a remedy that follows Florida and federal law and the U.S. Constitution (I’d have loved to have seen how they would have done that.)
Souter:
That’s six and seven. Seven of nine justices said the recount that was going on in Florida wasn’t proper. Anyone, Therefore, whining at the outrage of them stopping the count seems odd.
You mean like you just thought you did above? Nice try, Sammy. You bat more like Sammy Davis Jr.
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No. Gore made that offer – which wasn’t his to make – after the deadline had passed for any requests for manual recounts by Bush. The Bush camp saw very early on that, while this manual recount process may work in a local race at a local level, it is fraught with problems in a statewide or federal race - problems of subjectivity, partisanship, varying standards. Unfairness. Inaccuracy.
Their assertion was just supported by the highest court in the land.
See above. One person’s “votes that the machines couldn’t recognize” is another person’s “tabulated nonvotes.” One person’s “tried to block” is another’s “refused to accept a process that was inaccurate, illegal and unconstitutional.” The highest court in the land just agreed with Bush. Thankfully, they make the decisions, not people who think like you.
Paid? Maybe for some. Micromanaged? Bullshit. It certainly has been amusing, however, to see Democrats freak over Republicans finally getting pissed off enough about something to demonstrate, employing the tactic that Democrats use like a knee-jerk reaction to everything.
**
No, the fraudulency was thankfully thwarted last night. The system DOES work.
There, there. It will all be OK. Really.
Might I suggest you use that righteous indignation as fuel to get better balloting systems in those Democratically controlled counties, and to teach your fellow Dems how to vote properly?
In the wake of this disaster, I find it hard to imagine that he will have much luck trying to install any Scalia clones. (Crossing my fingers and praying)
stoid
Sorry for any lack of clarity. I’m predicting that there will be unofficial recounts, and we don’t know what the result would be. I see no reason to be as certain as you appear to be about who would “win” under which standards. Perhaps you could explain your certainty?
No. Gore made that offer – which wasn’t his to make – after the deadline had passed for any requests for manual recounts by Bush
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Bush had the opportunity as well, but didn’t take it up. The FSC offered it to him themselves in oral arguments, but he declined it then too. Then he went federal claiming it was unfair.
Insert predictable comment about shoes on other feet here.
Paid? Maybe for some. Micromanaged? Bullshit.
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Even the Wall Street Journal (Paul Gigot’s column) confirmed it, along with DeLay’s organizing it. I might object to the term “brownshirts”, but I’m surprised you haven’t.
I assume you can quote an instance or two? And even accepting your premise just for fun, are you really happy that your party is now just as bad?
This has been done to death by statisticians and analysts for both parties. All the parties involved knew that the whole thing hinged on the definition of the legal ballot. For this reason, the Democrats, led by Boies, made it one of the central issues. (Gore and Lieberman made a pretense of saying that they did not know who would win if their demands were acceded to. This was purely to help them appear high-minded about the principle that “every vote should count”, as opposed to merely helping themselves. They knew the truth.)
It’s a very simple matter. Gore picked up about 560 votes in Broward, and about 200 (or so) in PB. Difference - the standard used. So you can extrapolate from one to the other.
Had PB used the Broward standard, he would certainly have gotten another few hundred votes there. Add another 200 in Miami-Dade and he’s over the top with room to spare.
But if Broward (and Volusia, where Gore gained about 100 votes with dimpled ballots) were recounted using PB standards, Gore would lose at least 350 votes. Add Miami-Dade, where the 168 vote lead would also be shrunk accordingly, and Gore finds himself back to 600 votes behind. (The rest of Miami was predicted to give Gore about 150-200 votes even with counting dimpled ballots, so you couldn’t expect much without them.)
Could you please name ONE instance in all of HISTORY where the winner asked for a recount?
If Gore wanted the moral high-ground, he should have requested a state-wide hand re-count from the get-go. Even I would have seen this as an even-handed approach. (although I would have hated it)
Gore twice publicly asked Bush to meet with him and work out how to resolve this mess. Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider; I’ll work to end partisan bickering”) refused. Why, do you think?
IzzyR, you’re talking only about the counties where there WAS a recount, while I was referring to a statewide hand recount. As we well know, those counties went for Gore. If the problem ballots really were random, they’d add about evenly to the totals of each of the dozen or so candidates. If they really did show a preference for a candidate, that would show in a different total. If the mismarked or whatever ballots broke in proportion to the counted ones, as you’d expect statistically, the leader in that county would gain the most votes numerically. Note also that Bush gained almost as many votes in those counties.
If the whole state were recounted, you’d expect the same effect in Bush counties. If those counts were more accurate to start with, due to better technology or whatever reason, he might not gain as many votes numerically as Gore would in HIS counties. But more of the voters who intended to vote for a particular candidate would be counted, and it’s very hard to argue that it’s unfair or undemocratic. You’re stuck with legalisms.
The point remains that we don’t know who’d win a STATEWIDE recount, which is what I was talking about, under which standard, with the margin being as microscopic as it was.
?
?]Originally posted by ElvisL1ves *
** Bush (“I’m a uniter, not a divider; I’ll work to end partisan bickering”)**
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By the way, excellent article in the New Yorker last week, I think, closely examining this claim and where it came from.
Seems that Bush never united much of anything, nor did he end any partisan bickering, there was never any PB’ing to begin with. Seems that Texans, unsurprisingly, do things there own way down there and the fact is they really aren’t all that partisan. They get along very well, have for a long time, and Bush just walked in on that situation and claimed he was responsible for it. Of course, considering what little attention he pays to anything that isn’t right under his nose, he probably thought he was.
Why doesnt’ this surprise me in the least.
Anyway, given that fact, it would have been fun to see him try to “unite” the split Congress under normal circumstances…under these, it’s going to be real side show.
Talk about deer in the headlights… he is SO in way over his head.
stoid
We’re venturing far afield. I (as a Bush partisan) would agree that a full scale recount using restrictive standards would be fair. But I am also coincidently sure that Bush would win.
Of course we do. If Bush was ahead by 600 votes after the main Democratic counties were counted, which he would be under a restrictive standard, as I’ve pointed out, there is no way that he would lose that many votes (under the same standard) in the rest of the state. OTOH, if Gore had the lead, it is unlikely that Bush would regain it, with most of his voters using other systems.
So you can return to fairness if you like. But regarding the outcome of counts, it is well known what it would be, using a given standard. And nothing will change about this after the election.
IzzyR, I believe your high confidence in extrapolating such small numbers is unwarranted, but I also believe we’ll have the first set of unofficial statewide recount results in a matter of weeks or so anyway. See you then.
Actually, they suggest that everything would have been OK, absent the stay (Souter at 6, joined by Breyer). It’s hard to put them in with the majority when they’re saying that there would have been no Federal question, absent the stay - a condition created by the majority.
(Read better yourself. Swat!)
You know, if what we’re arguing about is the validity of the Supreme Court decision, it’s a damn fool thing to cite that decision as support for your position. That’s called circular logic, and is generally recognized as invalid.
Actually, at most three Supremes took the position that only votes recognized by the machines are valid. And I say that only because I haven’t had time to read Rehnquist’s concurring opinion; I doubt that any of them took that position. And I’m willing to bet, sight unseen, that even those three didn’t claim that it’s unconstitutional to manually identify votes that the machine doesn’t recognize. They’d be tossing out the laws of half the state legislatures in the country.
So you see, it’s effectively certain that there were votes in Miami-Dade, by even a standard that Scalia would have accepted, that Bush blocked from being counted.
I think they’d have to pay the expenses of the county if they insisted that the county do the recounting. Otherwise, I think - under more normal circumstances - it’s, “Here are the ballots, here’s a room, take all the time you want, but don’t take them out of the room.”
Of course, in this highly charged instance, I would suspect (and hope!) that they would insist on greater precautions, such as representatives from both sides be present for such ballot inspection/counting, and that any inspection be videotaped.
Actually, I’m not sure a full recount is necessary to carry any weight with objective, knowledgeable observers.
We’ve heard the phrase, “within the margin of error” so many times here (including the FL C.J. citing John Allen Paulos), but I’m not sure anyone knows what the margin of error really is, here. If I was flipping 6 million coins, the 2-standard-deviation margin of error is about 2450. But coins have 50-50 likelihood of actually changing value on each flip. What we’ve got is ballots whose true value (hopefully) doesn’t change, but have some much smaller likelihood of being read wrong each time they’re read. If that likelihood of being read wrong is 1%, the 2-sigma margin of error is 487; if it’s 0.1%, then the margin of error is down to 155. The manufacturers of voting systems undoubtedly run ‘truth decks’ (pre-marked ballots with the ‘votes’ already known) through the machines many times to see how much the results vary from the truth, and from each other. If we had their numbers, and knew how many votes were cast under each system, then we’d be able to compute the margin of error.
If we knew the margin of error, and a count using agreed-upon standards produced a ‘win’ for one candidate or the other that was outside the margin of error, then I think a full recount would not be necessary for any purposes other than curiousity to the point of exhaustiveness. (Though nothing’s wrong with that.)
I believe you are mistaken. Souter wrote that the courts might have taken care of this issue by themselves (or perhaps Congress), not that the issue was non-existent. Breyer, in his dissent writes explicitly that an appropriate remedy would be to remand it with instructions to use a single standard. Neither suggests that the proper course of action would have been to allow the recount as ordered by the FSC. Thus 7 out of the nine seem to agree that the manual recount as put into effect by the FSC was flawed by serious constitutional problems, if not outright unconstitutional.
The fact is that Gore asked the Florida Supreme Court in the first case to set a uniform standard. Now, it may be true in oral arguments when asked what that standard should be, they suggested a pretty liberal one. I don’t know. But, the court was free to choose a standard it thought reasonable and that is, as I heard it, what Gore was asking for. (Of course, the Court didn’t feel free to do that because they seemed to be afraid of being accused of rewriting the law…In retrospect [and, I actually thought this at the time too], I think they should have noted that the law was unclear here too and that they had to do some interpretation of it.)
Sure, Gore would have been completely statesmanlike if he had asked for a hand recount of the whole state and asked for a strict standard (although I personally think that chads with a hole punched all the way through, even if no corners are detached is quite reasonable, so I think it is irrational to want him to propose an incredibly strict standard).
However, why is it that you are asking Gore to be a complete statesman when you aren’t asking anything like that of Bush? Why didn’t the Bush camp say, “Yes…these machines clearly are not counting votes that were the intent of the voter and would be counted in a hand recount under Florida or Texas law, but we just want to make sure the standard is not too liberal AND that the whole state gets the opportunity to recount.”
Methinks you have a big double standard here!!!
Nah he said that Gore would have the “high moral ground” then.
What I like is the “Even though Gore did the opposite he said this”
Gore offers for a full recount of the state after he can’t offer it. Gore changes his position on the military ballots after he has denyed them. Hes just not hypocritical in what he does but what he says after too.
[QUOTE]
*Originally posted by Freedom2 *
Speaking for myself, I cheerfully absolve you of any obligation to read and respond to any post of mine, without let or hindrance, now and forever.
No, no, don’t thank me. Least I could do. I will endeavaor, in the interest of fairness, to do the same. As to rants, well, can’t promise that, though I do prefer smug sarcasm.
I can refrain from finger pointing, and so promise. After this one occasion. This finger is for you!