I don’t get this line of reasoning.
What you seem to be saying is that these people were morons. OK, let’s stipulate that they were morons. But morons are eligible to vote. And the evidence would suggest that some of the morons whose votes went to Buchanan really intended to vote for Gore.
Bottom line remains that it would appear that more people (combined moron and non-moron totals) in FL intended to vote for Gore than for Bush.
“It would appear,” “it would suggest,” “the voter intended,” “it seems to me,” “statics will prove,” - all that and fifty cents will get you a cup of coffee it would appear to me.
My point (for the last time because I need to move on) is that these folks, morons or not, DID vote. We have their votes. We counted their votes. Subjective analysis after the fact isn’t what most people wanted, and pictures of voting board members holding ballots up to the light were on the front pages of newspaper to illustrated just how ridiculously subjective it had become.
Where does it end? “Excuse me Mrs. Jones, may we come in please? We’d like to interview you to determine you really really REALLY meant to vote for Senator Smith.”
I don’t think anyone is arguing that we should use the after-the-fact demonstrated will of the people to overturn actual election results. The question being addressed here (by LHOD) was “did the election results actually represent the will of the people?”. He is pointing out that they apparently did not.
Again: that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t stand. That’s the system, for the very reasons you give. But as an abstract question this would seem to be the correct answer.
Bull fucking shit. Fifty cents does not get you a cup of coffee anywhere.
Not to get all pointyheaded about it, but we need to look at what the act of voting is. It’s the indication of a person’s political preferences. If the system for voting is set up such that the official interpretation of their vote is at odds with the intended indication, then the system is royally messed up.
Yes, yes, we’re all aware of what your point is. The confusion isn’t about what your point is. The confusion is about why you’re not moving on to the rest of the conversation. We’re saying, “Yes, and…” and you’re just repeating the same point.
We counted their votes. We have overwhelming reason to believe that the official interpretation of their votes is, for hundreds or thousands of them, not what they intended their votes to indicate.
There are a couple of possible ends.
For example, one end is to acknowledge that the system is screwed up here, but to say that sticking with the screwed up outcome is the best of several bad possibilities. That’s a legitimate viewpoint.
One end is to acknowledge that the system screwed up, and to say that it’s so screwed up that some sort of re-vote is necessary. That is in theory a defensible viewpoint, but I strongly suspect that it was, at the time, both illegal and impractical.
There may be other reasonable ends. But refusing to acknowledge how royally screwed up the voting was–refusing to acknowledge that the voting process almost certainly returned a result at odds with the result it should have returned (“should” meaning “in accordance with the will of the majority of Florida votes”)–is unreasonable.
Actually, this statement of yours appears to be false; after all, it states on page 3 here that 65% of the American people expressed confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court as an institution in September 2000 while 62% of the American people expressed confidence in the U.S. Supreme Court as an institution in June 2001:
http://scholarship.law.duke.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2162&context=faculty_scholarship
Actually, it appears that Bush would have only won in Florida in 2000 in the event of partial recounts; in contrast, all full recounts of both undervotes and overvotes would have very likely resulted in Gore winning Florida in 2000:
Here is a question, though–can’t one argue that the U.S. Supreme Court should have refused to take the Bush v. Gore case due to the fact that U.S. Supreme Court Justices have a conflict of interest (after all, the U.S. President appoints U.S. Supreme Court Justices; plus, even a healthy person can theoretically die unexpectedly)?
Any thoughts on this?
I think that, at the time the Supreme Court decided to take the case, when they were counting all those hanging chads, it was unlikely that all the recounting in the world was going to change the outcome, and Bush was going to win. So the actual decision the court made, handing the election to Bush, was just what was almost certainly going to happen anyway.
Nonetheless, I think it was outright treason that the Court decided to take the case at all. They should have let the events play out and fall where it may. Stepping in to settle it was totally unwarranted.
IIRC, the Court claimed that they took the case to avoid the possibility of a Constitutional Crisis. Well, I thought at the time (and still think), there were TWO utterly seditious errors in that thinking: First, there was no Constitutional Crisis going to happen. There was some possibility that the recounts would not have a clear-cut outcome, and some possibility that the Electoral College would not be able to decide on a winner. But that can’t be called a crisis. The Constitution itself envisions that possibility, and prescribes a protocol to resolve it: The election is thrown into the House of Representatives. Maybe nobody would be happy if that happens, but the Constitution covers it. In fact, there is precedent, because it has happened before, and the nation didn’t implode.
The second error in the thinking is that a Constitutional crisis is such a disaster that must be avoided at all costs. If there really were a crisis (that is, a situation that was never envisioned in the Constitution and for which the Constitution gives no procedure or protocol), then the proper time to solve that is when it happens. From that, some new precedent would arise and maybe even a new amendment to deal with it. (Witness, for example, amendments like the one that specifies presidential succession in greater detail.) For the Supreme Court to butt in to pre-emptively forestall such a thing is nothing other than an outright coup d’etat, and that’s exactly what that Court did.
I have to give you that one. I was full of it on the coffee 
None of the justices on the Supreme Court in 2000 were appointed by either Bush or Gore.
Regards,
Shodan
Against all common sense, you continue to claim that the probable outcome is somehow more accurate than the actual outcome.
Are you are missing the fact that Gore could not possibly have won under the recount that he was requesting. THAT is why the recount wouldn’t have changed anything. The ONLY way he might have won was to request something that he didn’t.
I regard the 2000 Florida US Prez election results as being a statistical tie.
That is, whatever numbers we have come up with have to be considered to be surrounded by a penumbra of “margin of error”. And the margin of error exceeds the difference between the Gore and the Bush totals.
I ended up detesting Bush with the passionate hatred of a thousand suns, and I can’t come up with anything nice to say about the Florida officials or the Supreme Court justices; but as far as the vote itself, I don’t think the actual factual outcome is knowable. We just don’t possess that kind of accuracy. Tiny differences in exactly what processes we use to make that determination throw the result this way or that. It’s a freaking TIE.
Good point AHunter.
And when it IS a tie, you just have to accept that the guy you pick MAY NOT actually be the winner. You just have to hope the process you have to make that choice when it gets that close is reasonably fair and unbiased. And despite some stupidity on everyone part in the event, IMO it was.
Or in other words, the best you can hope for is life being reasonably fair. Perfectly fair just ain’t gonna happen (and might not even actually exist for that matter).
Look, if thousands of people accidentally voted for someone other than for whom they intended simply because they didn’t look closely at the ballot, well tough noogies. I mean, you’re right that it probably happened. But there’s no way you can take clear votes for Buchannan and say, “well such and such percent of these people probably meant to vote for Gore so let’s flip those.” Even if it’s probably correct, it’s not legal and I don’t think it’s the right thing to do.
Not for conflict of interest on those grounds. They are appointed for life. The new President will have zero effect on them. The new president might have an impact on who will become their colleagues but they can’t get fired by the president.
Not exactly what I’m saying. The probable intended outcome is different from the actual outcome. That’s not only possible, it’s common. If I play darts, I might miss my target. If I intend to recite a poem, I might flub a word.
Under most circumstances, this disparity between intended outcome and actual outcome is trivial. Under some circumstances, part of the game is that intentions don’t always translate well: when playing darts, I can’t say, “Oops, I meant to get a bullseye, let me go move the dart.”
But in voting, there’s no intended space between intention and reality. Any disparity that appears is a flaw in the system. The idea voting system precisely and unerringly captures voter intent. Do you agree?
Since the debacle, voting systems in the US have gotten far, far better at capturing voter intent. And it’s possible to look at what happened in 2000 and say, as Barkis said, “Tough Noogies.” That’s a reasonable response.
But denying that the system fucked up is ridiculous.
No, but theoretically speaking, each of these justices’ replacement on the U.S. Supreme Court could have been appointed by either Bush or Gore. After all, in 2000, none of these U.S. Supreme Court justices could guarantee that they wouldn’t die within the next four years.
The thing is, though, that even a healthy person can unexpectedly die. Thus, U.S. Supreme Court justices might want a U.S. President who has similar views to their own to be in office at the time of their deaths (or retirements) so that their replacements on the U.S. Supreme Court will have similar views to their own views.
Or if Florida Judge Terry Lewis (in other words, the guy whim the Florida Supreme Court put in charge of the Florida manual hand recounts) would have decided to count all of the overates (in addition to all of the undervotes, obviously) in Florida in time; indeed, Judge Lewis might have very well been willing to at least try doing this.
Let us all in this discussion try to remember that whatever happened or didn’t happen in Florida, Gore indispudiably won the majority of votes across the country but not of course the Electoral Collage votes.