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Grex > Agora35 > #124: Win the electoral college but lose the popular vote? | |
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| 25 new of 409 responses total. |
aaron
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response 82 of 409:
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Nov 9 20:25 UTC 2000 |
How many times are you going to paste that same passage around Grex and
M-Net?
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mdw
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response 83 of 409:
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Nov 9 20:45 UTC 2000 |
I'm sure part of the confusion of the florida ballots was not just the
form of the printed material, but the mechanical lineup of the actual
ballot with the form. All evidence (such as the 19,000 ballots that
were "spoilt") indicates this was highly unreliable. If automobiles had
tires *that* unreliable, not only would there be a massive safety
recall, there would be armed lynching mobs out. In at least one case, a
person voting *knew* she was having trouble marking her ballot and was
*NOT* given the chance to get a fresh ballot, completely countrary to
all the rules.
Normally, I don't think anyone would get upset with all these
difficulties. The problem is that the vote in floriday is *so* close
that it is within the error of margin for counting. We might just as
well select presidents by roulette table as accept the current vote
count.
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jep
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response 84 of 409:
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Nov 9 21:02 UTC 2000 |
re #77: I'm glad the topic of Texas and Illinois from the 1960
election came up, because I think the information you posted was very
informative.
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mcnally
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response 85 of 409:
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Nov 9 21:49 UTC 2000 |
For a similarly informative article about the myth of the 1960 election,
see the "Recycled" column "Did Kennedy Really Steal the 1960 Election?"
in this week's Slate -- http://slate.msn.com/recycled/00-11-08/recycled.a
sp
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jep
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response 86 of 409:
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Nov 9 22:10 UTC 2000 |
Larry, what's your take on what's going on in Florida? The DNC is going
to support the lawsuits from the people in Palm Beach County who felt
defrauded by the confusing ballot. Do you agree with them? What kind
of outcomes can we expect if a court overthrows the election, or part of
it? Is that really likely to happen?
USA Today on-line right now is reporting the margin is 341 votes, with
63 of 67 counties reporting their votes.
The GOP is talking about challenging the votes in Iowa and Wisconsin,
because those elections were close, too.
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tpryan
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response 87 of 409:
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Nov 9 22:53 UTC 2000 |
I, too would like to know if there is any other state where a
re-count would have a chance of a change of outcome. Any other states
that automaticly do a recount on a % of votes basis?
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polygon
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response 88 of 409:
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Nov 10 03:10 UTC 2000 |
Re 86. I think it's obvious that the ballot misled people, but I'm
very dubious that any judge is going to order the election redone.
As a candidate, I get a copy of the ballot beforehand, and I have a
very short time window to object to it and demand changes, even if
they misspell my name.
But circumstances matter. I suppose if they put George Bush's vulgarity
in parentheses after my name, and never sent me a copy of the ballot, and
sent it to the absentee voters that way before I knew about it .... well,
a judge might get concerned about that.
There are more than three thousand counties in the United States.
Probably most of them are required by law to send copies of the proposed
ballot to the presidential nominees. Imagine what Ralph Nader's or John
Hagelin's or Gore's mailbox looks like with that flood of (often certified
or registered) mail coming in. It's hard to fault Gore for not opening
and inspecting every single one, and it's especially difficult if the
problem wasn't obvious from the paper copy, but rather the awful parallax
you get from the cheezy voting device.
So, yeah, this is very, very awkward all around.
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polygon
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response 89 of 409:
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Nov 10 03:13 UTC 2000 |
Also, I would certainly hope that other states would show A LOT LESS
change in a recount than Florida has. As I said elsewhere in Agora,
I am appalled at how sloppy Florida's election practices appear to be.
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aaron
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response 90 of 409:
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Nov 10 03:50 UTC 2000 |
I am very surprised by how one-sided the errors tend to be.
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gull
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response 91 of 409:
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Nov 10 04:33 UTC 2000 |
Yeah. It's really something. Is it this sloppy everywhere?
Michael Moore, on the Daily Show, has suggested that perhaps the UN should
send in election monitors. ;)
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other
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response 92 of 409:
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Nov 10 04:49 UTC 2000 |
re resp:81
>...Last time I checked, it was a privilege to vote.
The RIGHT to vote is a basic tenet of the American social contract. It
is not a privilege granted to individuals at the whim of other
individuals or of the government. Subtle but important distinction.
What's really amusing is that you follow it up with comments on
RESPONSIBILITY, the other side of the coin of freedom. Privileges don't
come with responsibilities, rights do.
Do you hoestly think people go out of their way to go to the polls on
election day so they can sloppily and casually mark up their ballots as
if they were pop quizzes by which they were taken surprise?
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aaron
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response 93 of 409:
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Nov 10 04:58 UTC 2000 |
I should add one thing - apparently the recounts reflect any absentee
ballots that had not previously been processed. If Florida required that
ballots be received on election day, rather than requiring that they be
simply postmarked on election day, the variance in some counties might be
comparable to what one would see in Michigan.
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krj
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response 94 of 409:
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Nov 10 06:17 UTC 2000 |
Synthesizing the efforts of a number of TV and print pundits, I start to
suspect that we could be headed for an outcome where neither Gore nor Bush
achieves 270 electoral votes. If court injunctions prevent Florida
from certifying its election result before the Electoral College
deadline of December 18, then I would assume that Florida does not
cast electoral votes. Alternatively, there is a process
for Congress to dispute Florida's electoral votes, and it's an easy
one to trigger -- CNN's Jeff Greenfield says it would just take
one Senator and one Representative to start it.
Election by the House, one vote per state... wheeee!
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senna
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response 95 of 409:
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Nov 10 06:20 UTC 2000 |
You can ask for a new ballot. If people were being denied new ballots upon
request, then that is definitely cause for a revote. However, simply claiming
errors? If they allow a revote in that county for that reason, I'd like the
rest of the country to get one too...
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gelinas
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response 96 of 409:
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Nov 10 06:23 UTC 2000 |
Yeah; I'd been arguing that the new Congress would decide, based on the
20th Amendment, but then I read the 12th more closely, which calls for
the House to decide "immediately"; the 20th only kicks in if a President
hasn't been selected by January 3, when the new Congress convenes for
the the first time.
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mdw
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response 97 of 409:
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Nov 10 06:34 UTC 2000 |
I finally got around to seeing one of the actual gif's of what the
voters in Florida saw. In fact, it looks *very* like what I saw in
Ypsi, so it must be the same machine. If so, I would guess there were
probably 3 technical problems.
The first is alignment. As I said before, even on the machine I saw in
Ypsilanti, the paper and the arrows were misaligned with the holes--in
my case, by about 1/4 hole. It was still possible for me to consciously
allow for this, but if the alignment had been worse, and the form had
been printed in a confusing fashion with a right vs. left shift, and I
wasn't voting for the candidate in hole #1, and this was the first vote
I was making so I hadn't had any "practice" with that machine, I can
well guess I might pick the wrong hole. If I really wasn't sure, I
might even try again with the stylus in the right hole, just to be sure
the hole was punched through. Also - the page is actually *raised*
relatively to the hole, by a significant amount. So there's a parallax
problem, and someone who was very short, or tall and hunched, would see
very different alignments, which would also change as the book was
leafed through and the different sides shifted in alignment. As I think
has been mentioned many times, the book in florida was laid out weirdly.
Normally, all the options are on one side of the paper, sometimes with
extra space if the text describing the options is big (as for a
proposal). That means even if there is an alignment problem, there is a
consistent and simple pattern to how the holes line up. In this case,
there would have been a more complex non-regular pattern going on.
The 2nd is the stylus itself. In Ypsilanti, I was actually faced with
two pointed objects. There was a pencil stub secured by an unbroken
ball chain to the booth. There was also a stylus, attached to a
*broken* ball chain, just sitting loose. I almost tried voting with the
pencil first although I quickly realized that the relatively fat pencil
point was *not* going to go through the hole & punch out a vote very
effectively. I can *easily* imagine that stylus getting lost (it was
more than half-way there already!) and the next voter would have been
confronted with one bad choice. In the web image I saw of the form in
the machine, it appeared to me there were pen or pencil marks in the
stylus holes, suggesting a number of people either made the wrong choice
of pointed stick, or in fact had no right choice.
The final problem is a design problem: once you've voted all your
choices, you *can* take out your ballot, read the punched out holes, and
compare it to the numbered choices in the voting forms. You *can* also
check to see that all the bits of chaff got punched cleanly out of the
holes. Neither of these is especially *OBVIOUS* however, and it mainly
occured to me because I've seen enough punched card equipment to know a
card when I see one. I bet lots of people think the voting machine
itself actually records the vote, and the punched card is just for
verification purposes. I certainly didn't bother to check *my* votes to
see if the numbered circles corresponded with the book, although I was
smart enough to hold the card up to the light and check (very cursorily
I might add) that there weren't any loose bits of chaff that hadn't come
out of the holes right.
I think it all fits to a pattern: the printed material worked *against*
the machine's design, in a way that was probably not obvious to *anyone*
until it was far too late to do anything about it. Probably some of the
printed forms were misaligned and made it all worse. I bet some or all
of those machines did not have the pointed metal stylus they were
supposed to have, and people were stuck using pens or pencils. People
with completed cards did not stop to check the card to be sure all the
chaff was gone, and exactly only the choices they intended to punch out
were punched out. The election officials were probably rushed, didn't
have the intelligence to realize the problem, and were evidently stupid
and pig-headed enough to bully the few who were brave enough to confess
they had a problem (such as the woman I mentioned whose "spoilt" ballot
was run through the counting machine in front of her very eyes). The
double punched ballots would fit with people not being sure they voted
(and not realizing how the machine worked) and trying to be *sure* they
voted for the right candidate. And *all* of this would be *far* less of
a problem for Bush than Gore, because Bush had that top hole (*Much*
less ambiguous), and people voting for Gore would have been doing so as
their *first* vote, before they became familiar with the ballot
machine's evils.
It may be as Larry says, that the Law won't care about such a mechanical
pattern of stupidity, or perhaps they would only care if it could be
proven to be an act of malice and not mere stupidity (and I do believe
it's at least 95% stupidity.) If so, I can kind of understand it, but I
would still be pretty disappointed in the Law for doing so. Frankly,
though, if I were Bush, I'd be insisting on that voting being done over,
and done right, because I would not want to be known as a cheat with so
little honor and integrity, it took a mechanical stupidity to get me
elected. Then again, perhaps that's just not the FratBoy mentality.
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scg
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response 98 of 409:
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Nov 10 08:22 UTC 2000 |
Jimmy Carter's book, Turning Point, is a very interesting read about obviously
intentional election fraud in his first campaign (for Georgia State Senate),
and how it was dealt with in that case.
I've been doing a bunch of thinking about this election, and the conclusion
I keep coming to is that the process is far more important than the outcome.
That's not to say I think the outcome is unimportant -- I'm a pretty strong
Gore supporter and really don't want Baby Bush to be President -- but I think
the process is even more important. Looking at other countries, both in
history and in the present, shows that a lot of democracies don't last all
that long, and a lot of elections are shams to try to make the government look
legitimate. I've been thinking about what sets the US apart from those
countries, and the most I can come up with is that in the US, everybody knows
when and how the process works, and if somebody were to claim to be President
without having been elected according to the process, society, including those
who control the government's use of force, would be unlikely to listen to
them. According to the theory I've been tossing around, this works both
because the process is frequent -- by the time somebody hits voting age,
they've seen at least four Presidential elections and two Presidential
transitions -- and because the process is consistent and agreed upon.
Countries that keep the same leader for much longer periods of time, several
decades in some cases, and then make up a new selection process each time it
finally becomes necessary, seem far more likely to have their transitions of
power end up in civil war.
So, what is this great American process that we all know and honor the
results of? Most of us can explain the easy part -- the people of each state
vote on who gets their electoral votes, and whoever gets the most electoral
votes wins. The rules for what happens next are less well known, but I think
most of us would at least recognize the Constitution as the authority on what
happens if there's an electoral tie. Even given that, nothing in the
Constitution explicitly answers the current Florida question, so it becomes
more tricky. The only definitive answer I can give to that, especially as
a non-lawyer, is that it's probably best decided in the courts.
Again, the most important thing for the courts is to avoid a situation where
they're making up the rules as they go along. Any hint of that would give
the appearance that they're chosing one candidate over the other, and would
seem to establish leeway for elections that get the "wrong" result to be
overturned for political gain. I'm assuming that any lower court ruling on
this would and should be appealed very quickly to the US Supreme Court, as
the one court in the country that can give a definitive and final answer to
what the process should be this time, and which will also set a precedent so
that the process for next time something like this happens, the system will
stay consistent. I would further suggest that, as they generally do, the
court give a very high ranking to other precidents for how this sort of
situation has been handled in the past, rather than making up something new.
This may be a sort of problem that's never been pursued very hard in a
Presidential race, but it's hardly the first election in the US that's gone
to court over disputes on the process. There's been a history in some parts
of the US of elections that have been affected by outright fraud, and I'm sure
there must have been other elections, on a local level at least, that have
been screwed up by mistake. The best thing the courts could do to safeguard
the future of the country for longer than the next few years, is to do a
thorough review of those precidents, and to come up with a consistent and
unbiased procedure for Florida to use in accounting for this situation.
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mdw
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response 99 of 409:
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Nov 10 09:12 UTC 2000 |
I agree, the process is important, and the courts probably are the right
place in this case. There are two other bodies that clearly have an
ability to muck around with the voting process (not just an ability, a
*duty*) - and they are the state legislature, and whatever executive
organ they create or delegate to the task. The legislature works before
to set the rules, the executive body works during to implement the
rules, and the courts work afterwards to fix problems with the rules.
The courts have almost certainly got *some* sort of common law basis for
deciding when and how to intervene in elections, and I suspect they have
methods to deal with malicious tampering with the election process (in
which case I assume they can do fairly drastic things), and cases where
random bad luck destroys part of the election process (in which case I
gather they like to ignore the damage, on the theory that it hurts both
candidates equally). It will be interesting to see how they act in a
case where random bad luck hurts one candidate more than the other,
*AND* the difference in error is a material factor in determining who
wins.
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bru
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response 100 of 409:
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Nov 10 13:29 UTC 2000 |
actually, the margin of error appears to be pretty small and related mostly
to not cleaning the punch holes of the detrius. most of the errors seem to
be below 2%, except for the 19,000 discarded in plam beach which gives it an
error of around 4 %.
Thats not a lot in the normal scheme of things, but what are the normal
margins ofd error in an election?
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aaron
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response 101 of 409:
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Nov 10 14:58 UTC 2000 |
If Bush thought there were any chance of his winning a revote, I think he
would be calling for one as a "reasonable resolution" of the dispute. He
knows he will lose a revote, and thus would lose the Presidency.
If the expected margin of error is 2%, and the actual margin of error is
4%, that is *not* an insignificant change, Bruce.
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gelinas
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response 102 of 409:
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Nov 10 15:29 UTC 2000 |
NB: This is not the first time the Electoral College would "overrule" the
popular vote. Doing so this time would not force a "constitutional crisis."
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krj
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response 103 of 409:
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Nov 10 17:27 UTC 2000 |
Today's Washington Post: the Bush people say they are expecting that when
all absentee ballots are tallied nationwide, that Bush will be
found to have won the popular vote.
Historically such ballots break Republican, the pundits say, and there
are a million of them in California alone, while Gore's popular vote
lead is only 200,000. A million California ballots wouldn't shift
California's electoral votes, but if they break 60-40 for Bush it wipes
out Gore's claim to have won the popular vote.
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tpryan
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response 104 of 409:
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Nov 10 17:29 UTC 2000 |
I would be willing to wait to see if the count if the absentee
ballots would render the possible change in vote counts in Palm County
a non-issue.
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goose
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response 105 of 409:
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Nov 10 18:57 UTC 2000 |
RE#102 -- Grover Clevland, 1888 was the last time (maybe the only other time)
I think.
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rcurl
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response 106 of 409:
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Nov 10 19:30 UTC 2000 |
I heard one report that the Palm Beach sample ballot printed in the newspaper
was not the same as the actual ballot - something like the sample ballot
was shown with all the candidates in one column, not staggered. I haven't
heard any follow up on that. What was the true situation?
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