The "I Told You Gore Won!" Thread

Great Debates
61

I was just about to say the same thing. John Lott’s research into concealed carry laws has probably been scrutinized more heavily than any statistical analysis I can remember, and by people who had an axe to grind and desperately wanted him to be wrong. And yet, I don’t know of anyone who has proven that he ‘cooked’ his numbers. The research has stood up amazingly well. Even some of his political opponents have conceded that the quality of his scholarship is very high, but they dispute things like whether he captured all the possible dependent variables. Certainly I know of no ‘slam dunk’ refutations of his work.

The anti-gun folks, on the other hand, managed to rally around Michael Bellesiles, who’s book “Arming America” was used to try to deconstruct the 2nd amendment by claiming that firearms ownership was rare in the early United States. That work has now been so thoroughly discredited that the man is in danger of severe disciplinary action from his own University. It turns out that the book is full of lies (one quick example: Some of the records that he claimed to have studied thoroughly to support his case turned out to have been destroyed in the 1906 San Fransisco fire).

62

My take on the situation:
(a) fundamentally, it doesn’t matter. Bush is now the president of the United States, and if a suitcase with 500,000 uncounted Gore votes suddenly turns up in Florida with a handwritten note from Katherine Harris admitting that she deliberately stole them, it’s not going to change that fact. Nor could it somehow stop Bush from legitimately exercising the powers of his office.

(b) But that doesn’t mean that it’s not an issue that should be discussed. It’s one of the most fascinating events in recent political memory (probably the most fascinating), and as such, it is perfectly reasonable for media sources to count uncounted ballots, make speculations, and so forth.

© both Gore and Bush acted, imho, extremely poorly in the days following the election. There is only one reasonable thing that either of them could have done, which is to immediately request that a nonpartisan organization of some sort quickly decide on the most accurate possible means of recounting all votes, and strongly urge the legislative and judicial branches of Florida’s government to implement that solution. Neither of them did anything approaching that. Much has been made of the laws that were already in place in Florida to govern a situation of this sort, but to be blunt, those laws were (a) more than slightly confusing, and (b) never intended to decide an issue of this relevance and magnitude. In an ideal world, there would have been an immediate bipartisan move to count all the votes in the state as accurately as possible, even if that meant missing some fundamentally irrelevant deadlines. For instance, would it have really mattered to the country if the election results, or even the inauguration, had been delayed a month or two?

Would we rather have people 100 years from now remember the election of 2000 as that weird election where it took 3 extra months to count every last damn vote so the duly elected president didn’t get sworn in until April, or the black mark on American history where the course of the free world was decided by a mishmash of butterfly ballots, supreme court rulings, etc.? (Note: as others have said, I’m not saying that Gore should have won and the election was stolen from him. I’m saying that no one knows who really should have won, and the precedent that that sets is a very very bad one.)

(d) while both candidates were basically just acting like weaselly self-interested politicians, when you strip away all the hyperbole, and ignore a bunch of side issues (many of which reflect quite badly on Gore’s campaign), the fact is that an effort to count the votes more accurately was STOPPED. That’s a pretty profound occurrence, and one that should not be overlooked. Who cares if there had already been two recounts? There was no rush. There should have been no priority higher than insuring that the most accurate possible method was used to find out how many votes each candidate received. There is no process more precious to a democracy than accurately counting votes, and the Bush camp stopped that from taking place.

(e) The real villains in this issue, however, are the justices of the US Supreme Court. Not only were they issuing a ruling that stopped votes from being counted, they did so on unbelievably flimsy grounds. So flimsy, in fact, that they stated in their ruling that it should never be used as precedent. I’m not a lawyer, but as I understand it, their reasoning is as follows:
-Gore requested hand recounts in some counties, but not all
-Therefore, the votes of some people in Florida are being processed in a different fashion than the votes of other people in Florida
-Therefore, there are some people in Florida, in the non-recount states, whose votes are not being counted well enough
-This violates equal protection

Let’s count the inconsistencies in this:
(1) By this argument, no voting should ever be allowed anywhere, because every county has different voting machines, etc., than every other county
(2) Was there anyone in Florida who lived in one of the non-recounted counties who brought suit claiming that their rights had been violated? Because by the SC argument, they were the victims, not Bush, whose lawyers were the ones bringing the case
(3) So you have some parts of the state where the vote counting will be better than other parts. Is the correct response to this to:
(a) count the entire state in the better fashion
or
(b) count the entire state in the worse fashion?

I strongly recommend The Betrayal of America by Vincent Bugliosi for an absolutely scathing, but incredibly convincing, indictment of the Supreme Court decision

63

Much as I’d like to bash Bush, I don’t believe this is accurate. I think it’s much much more likely that Bush simply opposed any and all recounts because he was currently ahead. There was no reason for him to need to guess which counties would or would not benefit him if recounted repeatedly. All he had to do was fillibuster and stall for time. Which he did.

64

(sorry for the repeated posts… I forgot to respond to this paragraph last post.)
This is an unsupportable conclusion. Gore happened to be in a situation where the fundamentally right thing to do (recount as accurately as possible) aligned with his personal goal. Bush didn’t. Thus, Gore acted “better” than Bush.

There’s no reason to think that, had the situations been reversed, they wouldn’t have each acted in a precisely opposite fashion.

65

We already had this debate december. I’ll pass on a reprise.

66

I post this every time this subject comes up.

It’s ignored every time, by people for whom it’s convenient to ignore it.

But I’ll try, again.

**
Actually, according to federal law (3 USC Section 2):

Additionally, Article II, Sec. I of the U.S. Constitution states, and I’m surprised if you don’t know it by heart by now,(bolding mine):

Guess what the Florida Legislature was vigorously in the process of assuring, before SCOTUS rendered the point moot? That the state’s electors would go to Bush.

Cite
Cite
Cite
And, if you need dozens more, let me know.

67

Granted, I’ll agree the incident gives us more insight into Bush’s lack of character than proof of Gore’s character.

However, there were some situations where Gore could have acted in his interest, but choose not to because it would have been wrong.

For example, he choose not to support a lawsuit concerning the absentee ballots that were sent to republicans illegally, because the votes that resulted were illegal though no fault of the voters.

It could be argued that he choose not support this suit for political rather than moral reasons, If he had gotten involved, then this would have been a clear indication of bad faith, that he didn’t get involved is equivocal.

68

Here are some more quotes from the article cited by Sam Stone

My comments. Assuming this study is correct:
[list][]It’s hard to believe a ratio of over 50 to 1 happened by accident.[]Note that white Republican ballots were spoiled much more than white Democratic ballots, despite the Republicans’ greater wealth and education. This might explain why Gore didn’t gain votes in the Democratic districts in which he requested recounts. The Democrats who controlled those districts may have already taken steps to eliminate questionable Republican ballots during the original count.

69

Well… trusting James K Glassman would have mean that you lost your shirt in the stock market even before the attacks:
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/99sep/9909dow.html

As for John R. Lott he also has some explaining to do on his methods:
http://www.gunfree.org/content/resources/resc_research_lott.html
http://www.pcvp.org/pcvp/firearms/pubs/hopkins3.shtml

But Lott is the one that furnishes his own rebuttal: look how he changes on his early opinions regarding the vote irregularities in Florida:
http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/final_dissent.htm

Until I see the data, I will doubt their conclusions, but if we use Lott’s early conclusion as a base, I would say the effect he is describing now is almost negligible for the final result.
I guess it is how you read data that allows some partisans to throw red herrings to confuse and keep people away from the obvious: The prince of serendipity is in the white house.

And Millosarian this is from one of your cites:
http://www.aiada.org/pubs/fup/2000/fu113000.htm

My impression was that the democrats would had thrown many obstacles and in the end congress would still had to decide like they did in 1876, so maybe the court acted mostly to prevent any compromises those meddling democrats would demand.

70

Oh, please. The article has no trouble making very precise claims about who did and didn’t get their votes counted in Florida, but they don’t even try to explain what methods they used to get those results. When counting ballots by hand, there is no way to know whether the voter is Deomcrat or Republican, white or black. The claims made by Jackson and others concerning the high rate of ballots from black voters being scrapped were based on comparing rates of spoiled ballots in districts that were mostly black and districts that were mostly white. Since there is obviously no district with a majority of black Republicans, there is no way to measure what percentage of their ballots got thrown out. Furthermore, that website that the article is on seems to contain mostly paranoid, conspiracy-oriented articles about evil government beaurecrats. It’s not exactly what I would call an unbiased source. Maybe some people here need to learn that not everybody who’s able to cobble together a website and publish a few articles deserves to be taken seriously.

71

Whoa. That’s why I said, “Until I see a peer review of this, I remain suspicious.” I agree with you completely.

72

What impresses me? Post after post of the right-wing Usual Suspects, and not one of them ever said “recount after recount after…”

Progress is slow. You take what you can get.

(You’ll have to excuse me, I’m the host of this thread. Tea? Jack Daniels? Soma? Oh, could you smoke that outside? And could you wait till I get there?)

73

I’m completely parched…have you some Paradise Tea? Oh wait, it’s too late for that. How about a Tom Collins?

And really, I’ve been very impressed as well. [sub]no bogarting![/sub]

74

Tea for me, thanks.

Oops, the James K. Glassman correct link is:

75

I hadn’t noticed any “right wing” expressions at all. There are, of course, a large number of posters who don’t agree with your every word, but I thought they expressed their views quite moderately. Your opponents’ only “strident” expressions were requests for proof and substantiation, hardly an unreasonable position. Just who are you referring to? And do you really think it advances the dialogue to employ such characterizations. I, for one, resent it mightily when others call me “leftist.”

76

Unless you’re discounting machine recounts, nope. Read on(my bolding):

http://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/11/08/election.president/

That was the first statewide recount. The second statewide recount is cited below.

Gore started the “fight”, in my book, by asking for selective hand recounts instead of asking for a state-wide hand recount. Bush’s team had to answer that. I really don’t fault Gore much, though. He was just trying to win the Presidency after an exhausting, expensive campaign – as was Bush. Understandably, neither candidate wanted to lose out to a statistical blip if they could help it. IMHO, it would have been inappropriate for either candidate to bow out too early or too easily.

The following quote, spoken by Bush attorney Ted Olson to Jim Lehrer, also establishes that the Florida-law-mandated second statewide recount took place. BTW, this is a great brush-up page, in its entirety, for those who want to revisit some of the details (my bolding):

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/election/july-dec00/olson_11-13.html

I’ve laid out in this post some of the “actual facts” I’ve based my opinion on.

77

But wait, there’s more (er, less). We have also not yet been treated to indignant assertions that the Supreme Court acted nobly and was doing us a favor by “preventing chaos”. We also have not yet been treated to claims that Gore was trying to subvert democracy by going to court to get all the votes to be counted, while Bush was acting honorably by trying to prevent votes from being counted. Or, for that matter, there has been precious little “Nyah nyah, our guy won, get over it, you losers.”

I’m actually starting to think there’s hope.

78

Oh, and Milo, you seem to have missed this in earlier threads. Florida, like all states, further delegates the choice of electors to its voters as part of its own state constitution. Let’s see an explanation from you as to how any state legislature can choose a slate of electors on its own without violating its own state constitution.

79

Here’s an index to a constantly-growing list compiled by Slate, in their “Whopper of the Week” feature.

80

Scalia would be all over your ass for mentioning on the state constitution in a presidential election :slight_smile: