It established the Republican tradition of grasping more political power with fewer actual votes. Admittedly, that is the most efficient way to proceed.
Thanks for the summary. I like it 
More broadly, the issue seems to have been Florida couldn’t run an election process. Or Jeb couldn’t, or chose not to.
I’m not sure how the result can end up being right when it almost certainly didn’t reflect the majority will of Floridian voters. I can see the argument that procedurally it was more right than wrong, but if so, it was a procedural correction that resulted in a real-world inaccuracy.
You keep saying that, but typing it over and over again doesn’t make it so.
From the PBS link above:
"The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled “undervotes” — ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through — to be counted.
The study, conducted by the accounting firm of BDO Seidman, counted over 60,000 votes in Florida’s 67 counties, tabulating separate vote totals in several standards categories.
While the USA Today report focused on what would have happened had the Florida Supreme Court-ordered recount not been halted by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Herald pointed to one scenario under which Gore could have scored a narrow victory — a fresh recount in all counties using the most generous standards."
Perhaps you think they’re incorrect, but I don’t.
That viewpoint is what soured many to the efforts post-election in Florida. Folks running around stating that they knew what the voters really wanted. And that they could read voter intent. Subjective, ambiguous reading of so called “voter intent” after the fact is arrogant and subject to all kinds of manipulation.
As I noted earlier, officials holding ballots up to the light to find marks to ascertain voter intent was ridiculous. People voted. The ballots were approved by both parties. Voters has access to them before and during the vote. At some point, if you either can vote or you can’t. And post voting mind reading, no matter how good you think you are at it just doesn’t cut it.
It sure doesn’t. Linking to a statistical analysis, however, does show that actual events made it so. Perhaps you’d care to reply to the analysis instead of repeating things that have nothing to do with the point I made?
I agree with all of this, except the result being right part. The Florida Supreme Court also got it wrong, but the thread is only about the SCOTUS decision.
Such brevity in your OP. Are you looking for others to answer a homework question, or do you doubt the logic of The Supreme Court?
Florida law at the time mandated a machine recount, which Bush won. It also allowed a campaign to contest up to three precincts to see if there was fraud and allowed a hand recount in those precincts if mistakes were found. It mandated that this all be accomplished by the certification deadline.
The Gore campaign contested the results in three precincts were there were the most Gore voters and where Democrats controlled the election boards. When the recounters found that it was not possible to conduct manual recounts in the alloted time the Florida Supreme court unconstitutionally extended the deadline.
In a much more diluted sort of way, Osama bin Laden may have tipped the 2004 election to George W Bush. Kerry was polling within a percent or two (sometimes ahead) in the couple weeks before election. Then a bin Laden tape surfaces in which Osama says to Americans “Your security is not in the hands of Kerry or Bush or al Qaeda. Your security is in your own hands.” Not that the specifc message was really the point: Bush was unpopular because of Iraq, which was already being perceived as a war we should not have gotten involved in and got involved in via lies and misdirection, but having a visceral reminder that bin Laden was out there and taunting us with messages changed the topic of the conversation from Iraq to Osama, and Bush was still seen as the better guy as far as protecting the US from terrorism. (I can’t explain why, unless it’s just a Republican versus Democrat thing).
So it isn’t unfair to say that bin Laden got GWB reelected, although he might have prevailed anyhow. Hard to tell.
I think the point you made has nothing to do with elections.
Was this a statistical anomaly? I don’t know, and I really don’t care. Are the anomalies all the time when we have a national election? I’d guess so.
We don’t choose our leaders by statistical analysis. We choose our leaders by going into an election booth, and pulling a leaver, touch a screen or pop’n out a chad. I know you don’t like it but I have to repeat - your statistical analysis is yet another attempt to ascertain voter intent. I don’t want you to do that and I don’t think the American people want to do that. I want the voters to vote. They voted and the votes were tabulated.
Those votes are attempts to ascertain voter intent. What do you think a popped out chad is, otherwise?
The point I’m making is that you might favor a specific count because it’s something everyone agrees on, or because it’s written into law. I won’t disagree with that. But the idea that the count they made accurately reflected the majority will of the population is ridiculous, as I already showed.
I get that you don’t know whether it’s a statistical anomaly: you’re ignorant of that topic, apparently because you didn’t read the article I linked to. I get that you’re comfortable in that ignorance. I don’t see why I should respect your comfortable ignorance of that fact, given how crucial it is to the course of our nation.
I am neither a conservative nor a Bush supporter but I agree with everything you said above. SCOTUS sullied itself with this case and many people on both sides of the aisle have lost confidence in the judiciary as a result. SCOTUS should be like Caesar’s wife, beyond reproach. They should never have taken the case.
I think it’s ironic that several people have cited a newspaper article and are claiming it says Bush unequivocally would have won the recount. The article doesn’t say that. It says that under some counting procedures Bush would have won and under other counting procedures Gore would have won.
The irony is how people are apparently only reading the part of the article that says Bush won and aren’t counting the rest of the article. So using their reading procedures, the article is a complete affirmation for Bush. Somebody else, using different reading procedures, would declare the same article is an affirmation for Gore.
Almost by definition any “statistical method” to measure something is going have more error in it than any method that attempts to measure the individual events individually.
A statistical counting method will be less precise but more accurate. Do you understand that distinction?
Actually, it was designed by a Democrat
not sure how that is relevant.
Have you seen that ballot? It is pretty easy to see how someone could have fucked that one up. Gore was the second name on the left hand side of the page but the second scan tron bubble was actually a vote for the first candidate on the right hand side of the page not for the second candidate on the left hand side of the page.
Remember hanging chads?
Yep. I don’t think you can use statistical analysis to nullify actual votes. The ballot design was unfortunate and almost certainly led to Gore’s defeat in Florida but at the time it didn’t seem like a huge deal because Clinton had made it all look so easy, he made it look like any idiot could run the government on autopilot. It turns out that Clinton wasn’t an idiot, he just couldn’t keep it in his pants.
It’s very relevant.
People are arguing how difficult and confusing it was to understand the ballot. I don’t live in Florida, but where I live, a copy of the actual ballot is in the newspaper the day before the election. And on the day of the election, there is a huge four foot tall picture of it. I’d be surprised if it’s not similar in Florida (although I don’t know if it’s the case). It’s very easy to see it before you go to vote and understand what you are doing.
It wasn’t a secret or a timed event. People need to be responsible for understanding how they vote, and take action to make sure they are doing what they want to do.
If the ballot was confusing then regardless of how big the poster was, the design is still confusing. There were over 420,000 votes cast in palm Beach County. @70,000 of them were cast for Gore, 150,000 of them were cast for Bush; 5000 for Nader and over 3000 for Buchanan.
You might be talking about a 1% error rate among people who wanted to vote for Gore. Usually this isn’t enough to make a difference. This time it was.
Things are only confusing until you understand them. This wasn’t rocket science. If they didn’t understand, they should have asked. There were numerous opportunities to do so.
My point is that there was no reason to be confused by this.
That parenthetical comment is telling. You’re saying that because of how elections work today–after Florida’s debacle made our voting system an international laughingstock–you think you know how it worked in Florida fifteen years ago, during the debacle that made us a laughingstock.
Whether you find your current ballot confusing or not, the fact is that plenty of people found certain ballots in Florida in 2000 very confusing. Whether they should have or not, they did. To the extent that we’re discussing confusing ballots, that’s what we should discuss.