I don’t think conceding an election has any legal significance. It’s more of an issue of trying to make the best of a bad situation, and to not look like a sore loser.
Anyway, with respect to the OP, Bush was elected president in the only vote that matters: in the electoral college.
Concession has nothing to do with the legal status of an election. There is no Constitutional or legal requirement or consequence for concession. It is simply a courtesy.
Excellent post UncleBill!
From UncleBill’s post
And from the LA Times Link (for those of you not in southern Cal. The LA times is a liberal newspaper. sometimes very liberal)
AND
(bolding mine)
Point is that you can’t go back and change the rules later. Hell, if you want to go back and start changing rules, You could probably make Dewey defeat Truman. You play the game by the rules Inforce at the time
On and one more quote from the Times article
Fascinating stuff.
I’m grasping for words to express how proud I’d be to belong to a political party that is favored by 90% of convicted felons. :rolleyes:
This thread doesn’t belong here. But since the mods haven’t been around much lately…
Accusations to the effect that FL Republicans tried to lock out felons are no more effective or valid than accusations that FL Dems did the same to servicemen overseas (absentee ballots). The bickering will continue ad nauseum.
Every demand for recount emanated from the Democrats. (Naturally – winners seldom demand recounts.) Every requested recount involved a FL county that was heavily Democratic and in which the board of elections was manned by Democrats. The FL Supreme Court that enabled the recounts was a panel of seven Democratic judges. Seldom is a deck so stacked…
But GWB won anyway. EVERY recount upheld his victory. NOT ONE RECOUNT went to Gore. And, as was pointed out before, the victory belongs to he who gets the votes in the Electoral College, PERIOD. GWB is not the first President who didn’t gain a majority or plurality in the popular vote, and he probably won’t be the last.
The whole thing is over and done, and it’s been over two years. Jesus, can’t we just move on??!!
Incorrect.
The problem is that the Electoral votes for the state of florida did NOT accurately reflect the will of the people of Florida.
Gore won every standard that included counting all of the disputed ballots from all of the counties (i.e., the entire state of florida). It is only when you take convoluted scenarios (only undervotes and not overvotes + ignoring certain counties, or only counting votes from four counties) that Bush won. Therefore, BY ANY STANDARD the ENTIRE state of Florida voted for Gore.
A related news story states
I should probably add an addendum to my post:
Given that the entire state of Florida voted for Gore, Gore was “elected” president and Florida’s electoral college votes should have been for Gore.
However, since the will of the people was unknowable until several months after the election, Bush was incorrectly declared the winner.
According to our legal system, an incorrect declaration is still binding upon the candidates.
Under various legal scenarios (including the one that played out in the SCOTUS), Bush would have been declared the winner. This declaration, however, should be recognized for what it is: A guess at who won the election without access to the complete set of facts. The guess turned out to be wrong.
You suffer under the misapprehension that delegates to the Electoral College are required to vote according to any standard at all. They are not. Here is a basic description of how the EC works.
You are further deluded in your belief that any legitimate recount favored Gore. I’m sorry, but it simply didn’t happen.
I am entertained and sickened at the same time by the never-ending mewling and whining over Gore’s defeat in 2000. In my last post, I pointed out the bizarre claim that Gore lost because a number of convicted felons – 90% of whom vote Democrat – were incorrectly prevented from voting. Your cite extends the idiocy further, to the contention that a huge majority of those who were unable or too stupid to operate the punch-card voting machines prevalent in Florida in 2000 were also Democrats.
What exactly is the point here? Are you claiming that the “cretin/criminal” vote would have put Gore in the White House?
Again, this thread belongs elsewhere, my preference being far in the past.
Thank you for the useless link. Here is a link on how lightbulbs work. It has about the same relevancy.
The state of Florida has decided that it will cast all of its electoral votes according to the will of the majority of the voters in that state.
Baseless claims do not belong in GQ. Facts belong here. It is a fact that AP, CNN, The New York Times, The Palm Beach Post, The St. Petersburg Times, Tribune Publishing (Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, the Orlando Sentinel and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in Ft. Lauderdale), The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to view each uncounted ballot. Their conclusion was that the majority of the entire state of Florida voted for Gore.
Actually, according to the most restrictive standard (Gore won under all standards, including this one) counted only voters who CORRECTLY operated the voting machines. The machines did not count the votes THROUGH NO FAULT of the voters.
Now, keep the tone to one appropriate in GQ.
The fact that a conglomeration of liberal/Democratic “news” organizations (how did the WSJ get in there?) hired a “research” arm of a liberal/Democratic university to “prove” – long after the election – that Gore won in 2000 is a surprise I’ll not soon get over. Wow. Who would have guessed? Thank YOU for the useless link.
George W. Bush won the Florida vote under the standards in place at the time. Every lawful (as opposed to what you claim to be “legitimate”) recount resulted in a Bush victory. Rehashes a year or two after the fact are not relevant.
Yes, Florida has a state law that requires electors to vote for the majority-elected candidate/party. They did exactly that. GWB became president. DUH. Monday-morning critiques are not likely to matter much over time.
Sonny, I said before that this one doesn’t belong in GQ. (Strain yourself and scroll…) I don’t need your advice about “tone.”
Where’s your cite, PP?
Anyway, you’re not realizing that the Florida legislature would have passed legislation giving its votes to Bush anyway, as is their prerogative. So in NO scenario would anything have changed. Still holding out for Dewey?
I like Ike!!!
the original post was a request for information, so I’ll try to give a factual summary of what happened:
Al Gore did in fact win the popular vote in the 2000 election, but as has been pointed out, it’s the electoral college that elects the president. It was a very close election on a state-by-state basis, and that’s generally how the electoral college works – if you win a state, you get that state’s electoral college votes. And the number of those votes is determined by population.
As a result of the closeness of the election, who won in 2000 depends on who won in Florida, which has a fairly large population. The Florida election was very close, and when Bush was given the win, Gore asked for a recount, as was his right under Florida law when an election was as close as this one.
The particulars of the recount went all the way to the Florida Supreme Court (I’m not sure what the grounds of the case were). The Florida Supreme Court called for a recount, which was appealed to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court, which has a long history of not interfereing with states’ rights, did intervene, and issued an extraordinary one-time-only (i.e., could not be used as precedent for future cases) decision that it was too late for the recount and they had to go with the original count and Bush was President and that’s that.
The majority of the Court that made that decision were appointed by Republican presidents, several by candidate Bush’s father.
A lot of people, me included, think this was a raw deal.
As has been pointed out upthread, a relatively objective recount conducted by a consortium of newspapers found that if the whole state of Florida had been recounted, Gore would have won Florida, giving him Florida’s electoral votes and the election. (A poster upthread said there is no absolute requirement that electors vote as their state’s citizens vote, which is true, but in point of fact voting as your state votes is how it works in almost all cases.)
There were also a huge number of electoral shenanigans conducted in Florida, where candidate Bush’s brother served as Governor, most notably the extremely inaccurate voter purge list created by a firm that has strong Republican Party ties.
Those are the grounds on which many Democrats consider the election of Bush to have been a sham.
I’m with 'em. Hell, if you’d heard the same set of circumstances about a Third World country election, you’d know the skids were greased.
Tell me again… how does my vote make a difference as long as there is the Electoral College? See, even our forefathers recognized a need for Big Brother! 
- Jinx
That would be 5 posts above your post.
I am at a lost to respond to Tbone2, who has fingers placed firmly in ears while chanting “la la la la la la la la”
I have never seen any evidence to show the NORC is political. They have been around since 1941 and do work for diverse groups (I believe they recently did the U.S. News & World Report’s Annual Ranking of America’s Best Hospitals).
They looked at each one of the 175,010 balots that were classified as undervotes or overvotes and classified each one into nine catagories (from blank, to dimple, to hanging, to a clean punch). The classifications were made from
The raw data is available from their website, which you can use to create your own scenarios.
Additionally, they ran several of their own scenarios, ranging from the most restrictive standard (e.g., completely punched chads) to least restrictive standards (e.g., dimple is enough) to “prevailing standard” (e.g., single corner detachment required…this was what the florida election officials were using). Each scenario resulted in Gore winning. The only scenarios that resulted in Bush winning were those that excluded certain counties.
So, to recap:
The state of Florida had no way of knowing which candidate was elected within the time frame that they were working in.
Various people proposed methodologies that would result in a guess of who won. Gore wanted to count some counties. Bush wanted to count other counties. Everyone was arguing that different standards should be used. However, these methodologies were merely estimates of who received the most votes.
Many of the estimates show Bush as the winner.
However, there does not exist any standard by which Bush was actually elected by the entire state of Florida. Every single standard shows the entire state of Florida winning the election.*
Therefore, had the state of Florida been able to vote its electoral college votes in a manner representative of the actual vote, it would have voted for Gore.
*In the interest of full disclosure, there is a margin of error here. Gore was the winner of the election by, depending on the standard, between 60 and 115 votes. If the margin of error was 0.1%, then that means (according to my understanding of margin of error) the calculation is + or - 175 votes. I have not been able to find out what the actual margin of error is. It could be 0.1%, it could be 0.01%. I don’t have a clue.
Edit: Upon preview I see **Evil Captor **had a nice summary. Well, I’m hitting submit anyway.
Please note the sticky thread at the top of the GQ forum page. Politicking will not be tolerated. It doesn’t matter if you think the thread will or should be moved to Great Debates. As long as you’re in our forum, you’ll play by our rules. Ben, TBone2, and Pencil Pusher, you may consider yourselves to be officially warned.
This was arguably a General Question, but it has been answered so I’ll close this thread.
bibliophage
moderator GQ
