Sorry, I missed your post earlier or I would’ve provided my cite…
Bending the rules boosted Bush totals
A fascinating article, IMHO.
Well, I guess either way they’d be throwing away their vote… 
I will predict that before the inauguration, those uncounted ballots that were trucked to Tallahassee are going to be quietly burned in an unannounced action that will forever seal the speculation. All evidence will point directly at the Governor’s office.
and what, deprive this Board of debate material for the next 4 years? Nah, they’d never do that.
I’ve already seen an article where most of the major accounting houses (PriceWaterhouse, for example) have turned down offers to officiate an unofficial recount.
Face it, this Bullshit won’t end until 2004 when the democrats hope to get the white house back. Then we will all switch side and begin this crap again.
You guys are deluded if you think some new count that shows Gore ‘won’ will rock the nation. This argument has always been about the standards used and the bias of the observers. If anyone releases a report showing that Gore won Florida, the same thing will happen that happened in the election - the Democrats will hold it up as proof that Gore won, and the Republicans will came that the count was biased.
This process is incredibly suggestive. In this first county alone, the newspaper has counted hundreds of votes that the election board itself says are invalid. There’s no way anyone will come to an agreement over what the ‘true’ vote breakdown was in Florida.
The full count (OK, “recount” if you must) isn’t only about the legitimacy of the candidates. That isn’t even the primary reason. It’s more about the legitimacy of their agendas. There are already some troubling signs that Bush will veer to the right to accommodate his base (i.e. he’s really goinig to go for that $1.3B tax cut scheme), rather than stick to the political reality of a split and a need for complete centrism.
If Gore is shown to have been the “true” winner even in Florida, that will make the Democrats’ and moderates’ case that their agenda was what the people mandated, and Bush will be under much greater pressure to accommodate it instead of his own party’s platform programs.
Such a result would also add pressure to get a realistic reform of election procedures going, instead of simply being talked about until we get bored with it, as I suspect will otherwise happen.
As I have said on numerous occasions, Florida would be a moot point if Gore had just won EITHER his home state OR the sitting President’s home state. Failure to do that is what cost Gore the election, in my opinion, not a few hundred votes in Florida that may or may not have been miscounted or disallowed.
Heck, that’s one of the major factors in choosing a running mate – presidential candidates tend to pick somebody from a state with a large number of electoral votes. The thought is that the vice-presidential candidate has a better-than-average chance of “delivering” that state’s electoral votes in the election. It usually goes without saying that the candidate can deliver his own home state’s electoral votes.
We are led to believe that Al Gore won the battle among educated voters, since polls show that people with advanced degrees went for him heavily.
Based on his anticipated “victory” in Florida when all the non-votes and spoiled ballots are counted, advanced degrees in what? Knuckle-dragging? Drooling? Applied scratching?
The Gore '04 campaign will be missing a bet if it ignores this potentially huge voter base. “Morons For Gore” - I can picture them being introduced with fanfare at the next Demo convention, marching down the center aisle to the strains of their battle anthem:
http://php.indiana.edu/~jbmorris/LYRICS/sherman.wonderland.html#6
(rant)
Yeah – we already know that Gore won. But the Bush campaign (orchestrated by Baker, IMO) hijacked the state and then stalled out the clock.
The only people who think Bush legitimately won Florida are conservatives whistling in the dark.
(/rant)
Yeah, and Gore supporters scoffed at the idea of the electoral college being set up as a group of “learned men” to insulate the Presidency from the morons. And so have said that it is antiquated and that we should get rid of it.
So which is it: are learned people good or bad for the nation? Or will you cite any statistic and say how it shows your side is better?
Sheesh. I voted for Bush and have a college education in the physical sciences from a top school. And yet when all the legal action was going on I was able to convince myself that if Gore won through all the legal action (stole the election, in my opinion), that I would still accept and support him as president. I’d think that after the excellent speech Gore gave, that his supporters would do the same.
What would Gore’s excellent speech have to do with pretending that we believe Bush’s presidency is legitimate? I don’t believe it, and I know Gore doesn’t believe it. But he wants to either be remembered kindly by history or have another shot at it next time, and the best thing for him to do to acheive both goals is play nice now. I have no such need, I am merely a citizen who is thoroughly disturbed by the installation of Bush into the Presidency when I know he did not legitimately earn it. Or, at best, I don’t know if he did or didn’t, because he fought so hard to make sure I wouldn’t.
stoid
hmmm…You mean sort of like how Mayor Daley ordered the ballots destroyed in Chicago after Kennedy stole the election in '60?
Seems like most of y’all, in decrying the validity of the Lake County count, are willfully ignoring one of the more crucial parts of the OP.
Yup…gotta love that whole “equal protection” thing, huh? :rolleyes:
The only thing sadder than nursing a grudge like that is having it unskeptically based on false information. Nixon would have lost resoundingly even if he had won Illinois. Try this for some enlightenment.
Isn’t the whole point of having local canvassing boards and such is so that municipalities can set their own standards on what constitutes a “legal” vote? I’m all for going to a national voting standard, but until we do, we can’t complain about one canvassing board saying “That one’s valid” and another saying “That one’s not valid.” It’s part of the process.
Remember, both Democratic and Republican party officials in all these locations signed off on the ballot format, and all parties knew ahead of time what the standards for a legal vote were.
Well, except that the rationale for the Supreme Court’s decision was that the counties didn’t have a unified standard for counting votes. Posters on this thread are saying, “well, those Lake County ballots shouldn’t have been included anyway,” conveniently overlooking the fact that similar ballots were included in hand recounts in Seminole and Orange Counties, allowing Bush to pick up votes in those places.
Equal protection my patoot.
Wow Stoid, you don’t believe a word Gore said in his speech and you supported him as a candidate? You claim that Bush manipulated his way into the presidency but don’t complain that Gore was trying to do the same (while calling him a liar)? Can you even see the inconsistency here? Are you capable of admitting error?
I didn’t believe a word of Gore’s speech even though I supported him.
He said what he had to out of political necessity. Having lost in the nation’s highest court, there was nothing he could do but use his position to settle the nation down and begin plotting his revival. And he did hint [twice, I think] that he’d been robbed.
The Florida situation was rife with political manipulations. If not for Katherine Harris’ truly partisan interventions, there would have been enough time for the recounts which the Supreme Court affirmed. They voted how they did because they felt there wasn’t time.
Nearly every news source used the phrase “running down the clock” to describe how Bush was handling the situation. He had the Attorney General, Governor and a Republican legislature all playing at this game.
Then consider the African American vote. Robbed.
Oh, and what’s this? Orange County, Fl. Chief Executive made Housing Secretary?
Oh no, Bush called him “Secretary of Housing and Human Development.” That must be something else entirely.
I suppose it’d be too obvious if he gave Katherine Harris a gold medal. She’ll have to wait her turn.
-Toiletduck
Wow Stoid, you don’t believe a word Gore said in his speech and you supported him as a candidate? You claim that Bush manipulated his way into the presidency but don’t complain that Gore was trying to do the same (while calling him a liar)? Can you even see the inconsistency here? Are you capable of admitting error?
**
[/QUOTE]
Wow, emarkp, you certainly are reaching hard, arntcha? Did I call Gore a liar? What did he lie about? Did he say “I know Bush won” - no, he said “Make no mistake, I strongly disagree with the Supreme Court’s decision.” I believe he meant that, don’t you? He also said “I accept it” - i believe that, don’t you? (After all, what choice did he have?)
Seems to me that YOU are the one in error here, emarkp, in trying to put words in my mouth and Gore’s. And absolutely NO, I do NOT agree that Gore was trying to “manipulate” a damn thing. All he was trying to do was get the votes counted. Period. Because, as has been pointed out repeatedly in detail, more people went to the polls and tried to vote for Gore than for Bush. The number who did so could have been anywhere between a thousand and twenty or thirty thousand. But take away all the screwups and errors and endless list of crap messing up the election in Florida, and you have more people for Gore than for Bush. And you more than half a million in the country as a whole.
Bush stole the presidency, period.
Speaking of which, I heard Bill Mahar making a joke last night about some poll that had gore way ahead of Bush for 2004. Anyone hear anything about that? (Not that it means much, but I’m just curious)
Anyone wonder what the conversation between Gore and Bush really was the other day? Were they real with each other? Were they completely alone at any point?
Stoid
Elvis said:
Why would I be “nursing a grudge”? I wasn’t even born in '60, and as for this election, my candidate won.
I was responding to the post by Fear Itself accusing Jeb Bush of ordering all of the ballots to be secretly burnt.