You really ught to read my posts before you reply to them. Your arguments aren’t reacting to mine at all…
For instance:
Writing new laws is sort of what a legislature does.
The rest of your replys are similarly off target, so replying to them would only increase the confusion.
tj
[quote]
originally posted by bo
The first count was not the “2nd quarter”, it was the final count.
[quote]
Better check a dictionary on the word ‘final’ it doesn’t mean what you seem to think it means.
tj
It is precisely this assumption about the relative accuracies of the successive counts that many people dispute. With some justification, I think. The inherently subjective nature of a hand count, especially the way this one seems to be being done, is…unsettling.
I somewhat expected somebody to jump on that, and all I can say is that we disagree in our terminologies, apparently. “Liberal” and “conservative” labels need not be reserved for extremists, IMO.
Ah. theres the meat of the argument. The Bush team would have you believe that the subsequent counts are somehow less accurate than the first ones. But this is untrue.
Every ballot that was picked as a vote by machine has been picked up as a vote for the same person by a hand count. The Bush team has tried hard to suggest that this is not so, but they havn’t come right out and said so because that would make them liars.
What hand counting does is to treat the ballots that the machine didn’t recognise as having a vote on them differently. It treats ballots that have the chad completely removed exactly the same as the machine did.
So lets say you have 1000 voters, 501 for Bush and 499 for Gore. You have a 4% undervote rate. Assume that everyone votes for president. (I don’t have the statistics on this at hand, but the number of people who bother to go to the polls and then don’t vote for president is miniscule. If someone thinks this isn’t true I’ll try to find the cite.)
a 4% undervote means the machine count misses 40 ballots, if those 40 ballots are relatively evenly distributed, but not quite. Lets say you have 22 Bush undervotes and 18 Gore undervotes.
So the machine count tells you that the result is Bush 479 Gore 481.
A second machine count dislodges some more chad, and we your undervote count drops to 3%. Say 16 Bush undervotes and 14 Gore. Now the result is Bush 485 Gore 485.
The second count is more accurate because it counted more of the votes.
Then you go through the ballots by hand looking for the voters intent. This is where bias can happen, but even then you can only bias the discards. A vote for Bush can’t turn into a vote for Gore here. The only possible source of bias is that you have a higher bar for deciding what consitutes ‘intent’ for one candidate than the other.
Now even if you have bias in the counting, the result here is still more accurate that the previous counts. The only way it could be less accurate is if during hand counting you don’t recognise as votes ballots that the machine had recognised. Anything else gives you a larger percentage of the total vote counted and thus a more accurate result.
Also, the more permissive the standard that you use for determining the voters intent, the fewer votes total you discard and thus the smaller effect that bias can have on the result.
The fact that each subsequent count is more accurate than the last can be proven. it is not an assumption.
tj
Here’s a link to analysis of the court’s ruling.
http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/election/election2000-0.htm#going
Tj… your patience, your thoroughness, and your articulateness are all much admired and appreciated.
You rock.
stoid
I agree with you, with the exception of your assumption that there is no random error in the process. I’d be pretty surprised to find that random error in ballot counting is less than 0.1%, although I don’t have any numbers available (and I’d love to hear from anybody who does).
Yes, “hanging chad” error, or “dimpled chad” error, will converge to zero in successive recounts, but they’ll always be accompanied by the noise of the random errors. I’m concerned that the actual difference between the two candidate’s totals is, in fact, lost in this noise. If that’s the case, then it really is a crapshoot on any given ballot recount.
Of course, a simple solution to that would be to average several recounts - random noise would be minimized in that process.
If it’s shown that the random error in the counting process with these machines (or by hand) is expected to be significantly less than the difference between Gore’s and Bush’s vote totals, then I’ll concede your point.
TJ, you’re still missing the difference between common-mode error and bias. A 4% error rate that effects both candidates equally is much more acceptable than, say, a system that had an error rate of 2% for one candidate but only 1% for the other. This can be seen by the results of the recount - of hundreds of thousands of hand-counted ballots, the difference between Gore and Bush is only a couple hundred votes. Yet the absolute magnitude of error is pretty high, with each candidate picking up thousands of overall votes (i.e. Gore picks up 512 in one county, while Bush picks up 487, for a difference of only 25 votes even though the machine undercounted by almost 1000 votes). This is the cancellation effect of common-mode error.
It doesn’t take much bias to create a relative difference between candidates of 30 or 40 votes out of hundreds of thousands. But if that much bias existed, it would be LESS accurate than the machine count.
The other flaw in the recount process is the changing of standards in mid-count. This gives the people running the election the option of changing the rules to favor their candidate (i.e. if it turns out Bush has a lot of dimpled chads, just keep using the current standard. But if Gore is collecting more dimpled chads, then suddenly change the standard to allow them). This allows partisans to manipulate the result.
But the bottom line is that no one will EVER know which person REALLY won the election, because the result is closer than the margin of error all across the country. So is the popular vote - a difference of 100,000 votes or so out of 100 million is almost certainly within the margin of error.
So, the selection of this president HAS to be arbitrary. The question was merely who’s set of rules to follow to get to the arbitrary finish. The Democrats have nothing to lose.
Umm, this post is against several rules, here. Oh Moderators!
If Bush wins “President by mistake” or “Pres by ONE Republican vote” (ie the very biased SoS).
However, i hope we do not go there. Whoever wins, let us savage him only for the “stupid policy decisions” he (whoever it is) will undoubtedly make.
Well, yes it is. You could argue that it’s not the Gore camp’s duty to ensure that under-reported Republican votes be counted, or that Bush was a dope for not asking for recounts. But Gore did not select the counties for recount that he did for any reason other than he thought they would favor him (and other counties would not). That’s not seriously in dispute, is it?
Also, as far as Bush missing the 72-hour deadline for requesting recounts–does anyone else feel that if Bush made that decision under a different set of rules (i.e., assuming that there was the 5:00, 7-day deadline that would limit any shenanigans), it may not be fair to hold him to that deadline? Someone else said it in this thread–all this “Well, he missed the 72-hour deadline, so he has no one to blame but himself” talk seems a little unseemly given all the rhetoric regarding the need to “count every vote” and to extend the certfication deadline. A deadline is a deadline, indeed (except when it’s not).
And it doesn’t matter if Gore “offered” a statewide count before–he had no authority to do so. It is the courts, not Gore’s offer, that have effectively changed the rules of the game (or clarified them, depending upon where you’re sitting). That’s why it’s an issue now, I think.
Umm, “unconstitutionally”? A decision by the Fla Suprem Court? “I do not think that word means what you think it does”.
Well, I don’t think it ought to be an issue…at least not in the way you frame it. You might be interested in the following quote, which is footnote 56 in Florida’s Supreme Court decision:
So, apparently, the court extended the possibility of a recount in other counties to the Bush camp (and the Gore camp), and Bush turned it down; thus the “different set of rules” argument is moot. Now: was Bush courageously sticking to his guns or foolishly ignoring a potential advantage? You decide.
The significance of this completely escapes me. Bush believes, and argued in court, that manual recounts are inherently flawed. The court graciously offered him the opportunity to agree that his entire argument was bogus, and to then turn around and do his own. What a great deal.
So the answer is that Bush was neither “courageously sticking to his guns” nor “foolishly ignoring a potential advantage”. He was trying to avoid undermining his own argument in court. Unfortunately it didn’t work anyway.
Maybe that’s right - but if both the candidates had agreed to a statewide recount, and told their respective party organizations and Sec’y Harris that they wanted it in order to settle the matter as clearly and fairly as possible, don’t you think a way would be found to make that happen? Don’t you think that applies to any other procedural rules they could have agreed to?
But since Bush turned the “offer” down, we’ll never know how it would have turned out. We DO know who’s responsible for that decision, though, and there’s no way to spin it into Gore’s fault.
I think it might be a huge mistake for Bush to appeal this ruling to the Federal courts. All the analysts that I’ve heard have said that it is extremely unlikely that they would overturn this decision. This is unrelated to the merits of the case - federal courts defer to state courts on election law.
But the damage could be great. At this point, if (as seems likely) Gore succedes in getting dimpled ballots counted as votes, Bush’s last hope may be to have the Florida legislature appoint it’s own electors (Jeb may be useful in this). This would be difficult politically, but it would be alot more difficult if the US Supreme Court had affirmed the FL court ruling, even on jurisdictional grounds (the distinction would be lost on most people).
Well, I just don’t see by what standards Clinton or Gore can be called liberals. Even by standards of the U.S. political spectrum, it is hard to make a case that way and, by the standards of the western democracies in general, some of their views (e.g., on the death penalty) would be considered not only conservative…but probably reactionary!
Bush may have shot himself in the foot by not demanding a recount of the entire state. But Gore shot himself in the head by trying to throw out the military vote.
The democrats have declared that the right to have your vote counted is of paramount importance. The Florida Supreme Court agreed. Just as Bush has put himself at a strategic disadvantage by locking himself into the “handcounts are unfair” mentality, the democrats have now locked themselves into the “every vote is sacred” mentality. And that will come back to haunt them when the issue of the military ballots gets heard in federal court.
It’s either sacred or it isn’t.
If the little old ladies who couldn’t push a card hard enough to puncture it should have their vote counted, I daresay the democrats will have a hard time explaining to a federal judge why the men and women serving in the armed forces should have their vote thrown due to a technicality over which they had no control.
A couple of thoughts here on recent posts:
First, it doesn’t ‘undermine’ your position to a court if you tell a court that, should it decide contrary to your position, that you want some added remedy yourself. Mr. Bush could have said (through his proxies, the attorneys), “I think manual recounts are inherently flawed, and I don’t think they are legal in this case. BUT, if you are minded to disagree, and allow the late totals in, I would like to reserve the opportunity to determine if there are other counties in which such recounts should be requested.” We lawyers do stuff like that all the time, and no judge would consider it inherently conflicting to so do. I think Mr. Bush was more worried about the popular appearance such a request would create, and probably doesn’t feel that manual recounts in heavily Republican counties would result in significant vote pick-ups for him, either because those counties don’t use the infamous chad ballots or because the totals didn’t reflect heavy ‘undercounts’.
As for the military ballots, Florida law is quite clear: they must be dated to make it clear that the vote occurred on or before the date of the election. In the absence of a date, it would be impossible to know if the ballot was voted and sent after the election was completed. Some counties have determined that, in the absence of a postmark or other date on ballots by the military voters, there is no date of vote determinable. The Attorney General for Florida has made it clear that relying SOLELY on postmarks in the case of military ballots is not a legal position; presumably there may be other ways of determining if those ballots were voted timely.
I think you may have misunderstood me, Izzy. I was replying to Bob’s thought that “does anyone else feel that if Bush made that decision [not to request recounts] under a different set of rules (i.e., assuming that there was the 5:00, 7-day deadline that would limit any shenanigans), it may not be fair to hold him to that deadline?”
Since Bush had the opportunity to request additional recounts quite recently, there is no “different set of rules.”
I assume, and I imagine you’d agree, that Bush feels that manual recounts are inherently flawed, and that is why he didn’t request additional recounts, rather than because of his assumptions of the election deadlines. The “different set of rules” argument assumes that Bush would ask for a manual recount if it is strategically to his advantage, irrespective of his feelings on the accuracy of the count.
Err… is that clear? Or are you arguing that should now be able to request additional recounts, now that the FL Supreme Court has ruled against him? (I’m not trying to be facetious, here)