[QUOTE=BrainGlutton]
If the recount proves Allen the winner . . . what then? In terms of national government for the next two years, I mean. With a tied Senate, how often will Cheney invoke his right to cast a tiebreaker vote?
[/QUOTE]
Every time it’s 50/50, I’d guess. I’m pretty sure he HAS to vote in those instances but I might be wrong.
More importantly, it means that the Republicans will chair all of the Senate committees.
[QUOTE=Jophiel]
Every time it’s 50/50, I’d guess. I’m pretty sure he HAS to vote in those instances but I might be wrong.
[/quote]
No one has to vote. He can even choose not to be there if he wants.
Does it? If it’s 50/50, don’t they set up co-chairs?
Co-chairs? Man, a coin toss would probably be more workable…
Caged death match! 
[QUOTE=Sam Stone]
Sure. Me. If there’s a mandatory recount, fine. After that, Allen should graciously admit defeat, congratulate the winner, and get on with his life.
[/QUOTE]
To me, the issue is not whether the presumed loser chooses to erquest a recount or not. What I object to is people attempting to STOP a recount, however it’s being done. If you count millions of votes and after counting, your side is ahead by 500, but that’s well within the margin of error, the self-interested thing to do is certainly to use all means, legal and extralegal, to make sure that that count is the official one. However, that is NOT the thing to do which most upholds the will of the people, nor do I think it’s the right thing to do. There’s a big difference between, say, an endless appeals process in a court case, where higher up courts might make totally different decisions based on fairly subjective criteria; and a vote recount, which is just going to make things more accurate. Why would you ever want to stop a recount? If the recount comes out in your favor, you’ve lost nothing and done the right thing. If it comes out against you, then you should NOT be being elected in the first place, because you WERE NOT RIGHTFULLY ELECTED. And “let’s put it behind us and move on” strikes me as pretty meaningless. So what if things take an extra week to resolve. On the grand scale of things, what’s a week? What’s more of a meaningful strike against our system of government… the image of people trying to count votes as best they could while an angry partisan mob pounded on the door, or an election result that doesn’t get officially certified until a few days later than originally intended?
Now, there are plenty of examples of people from both parties doing things like gerrymandering which don’t do much to improve the general efficacy of the democratic process, and the democrats in 2000 may well have been precisely as moral and/or amoral as the republicans. BUT, in that particular part of that particular issue, the republicans were, imho, dead wrong.
You have to admit that the 2000 election, in particular, was enough to make the sanest person go out and manufacture some headgear out of very thin metal. The combination of the butterfly ballot, the big list of supposed felons that disenfranchised a bunch of people, the recount-stopping, the fact that Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris were in charge of the whole process, and how close it still ended up being… Maybe absolutely none of it was anything other than coincidence and mistakes. Maybe. Honestly, I’m not sure. And the fact that I, a (take my word for it) basically level-headed non-conspiracy-minded guy, even considers entertaining the notion that the presidential election was corrupted, is pretty disturbing. Let me ask you this: are you comfortable with how things went in Florida in 2000?
[QUOTE=John Mace]
Does it? If it’s 50/50, don’t they set up co-chairs?
[/QUOTE]
According to this link…
From that it seems that whoever has the vice-presidency tips the scales in regards to chairs.
You were right though about not having to vote. For some reason, I thought it was a duty rather than a privilege.
Thanks! I’m rather embarassed, because this is recent history, and I obviously forgot the VP breaks the tie even when it comes to chairs. I must concede that changes my view of Lieberman’s actions somewhat, as he would have good options even as a pure cynic, since Cheney would hand control to the Pubs.
The word right now is that Allen will give up the ghost. His people are looking at the canvassing in Virginia and realizing that they aren’t going to pick up the votes they need. For everything else you can say about Allen, he’s not being a hypocrite here.
The man’s entitled to a recount and if he wants it, I won’t quibble over it. I say let’s make sure we get it right just like instant replay in football. What’s the hurry- we have until January to seat the new Congress.
I agree that there certainly ought to be a recount if Allen wants it. However, it is worth noting that, in percentage terms, the results in Florida in 2000 was something like ten times closer than this one. So, it really seems like a long-shot that a recount would change the result. Allen, recognizing this fact, may decide not to demand this (as Kerry did regarding Ohio in 2004).
I’m wondering if there were any behind the scenes deals with this. Perhaps some sort of a deal with the very liberal Maine Republican Senators Collins and Snowe to not flip to Independant if Alllen would concede gracefully.
It just occurred to me that my thinking about the comparison to Florida in percentage terms might not be strictly correct. If errors made in counting were purely statistical (which they presumably aren’t…although it may not be a horrible approximation) then they would go as sqrt(N) where N is the number of votes and thus they would tend to decrease in percentage terms (and increase in absolute terms) as N increased. But, at any rate, the absolute number difference in the number of votes here is still several times what it was in Florida in 2000.
[QUOTE=MaxTheVool]
If you count millions of votes and after counting, your side is ahead by 500, but that’s well within the margin of error, the self-interested thing to do is certainly to use all means, legal and extralegal, to make sure that that count is the official one.
[/QUOTE]
Just as a technical note, I don’t think “margin of error” is the right term here. “Margin of error” is a term used when you have a sample of a population, to reflect the fact that there’s uncertainty that the entire population is identical to the sample population. If you look at the entire population…in this case, the millions of votes, and one person is ahead by 500, then he’s actually ahead by 500. All a recount does is, hopefully, catch any errors made in the original count.
I continue to wonder why the recount is necessarily more reliable than the first count.
That is correct. This would be a “systematic error” and not something to which population statistics really applies.
[QUOTE=Walter Windchill]
I continue to wonder why the recount is necessarily more reliable than the first count.
[/QUOTE]
Greater scrutiny, perhaps? The Democrat were said to have 7,000 lawyers and such look for electoral misconduct this year. I’m betting 5,000 of them are in Virginia right now.
The increased scrutiny by the Dems might also explain the relative lack of electoral shenanigans this year. It didn’t happen becuase we wuz watching!
Well, Reuters reports he has officially conceded. 
[QUOTE=Walter Windchill]
I continue to wonder why the recount is necessarily more reliable than the first count.
[/QUOTE]
Presumably because the first count is generally made by hurried and tired people. Yet they rarely are wrong by much. I am constantly impress by the diligence of our election workers.
*Honest * counting errors tend to cancel each other out, anyway.