response 50 of 96:

Dec 14 17:44 UTC 2000

Obviously the race was close, but it seems equally obvious that more
people went to the polls intending to vote for Gore than for Bush, both
nationwide and in Florida.

Gore got all the bad breaks.

 - Nader.  OK, this one doesn't count, but if Nader hadn't run, Gore
   would almost certainly have won Florida.  But heck, any of the third
   party candidates took enough votes to change Florida, and third party
   candidates aren't against the rules.

 - Butterfly Ballots.  Because of bad ballot design, Gore loses enough
   votes to Buchanan to throw the Florida election to Bush.  This is
   the most unquestionable of screw-ups that went against Gore.  There
   was really no chance to fix it, short of a revote.

 - Punch-card undervotes.  Punched cards register a lot more undervotes
   than other systems, and are more heavily used in the urban areas
   where Gore has the strongest support.  Manually retabulating all
   these probably would have put Gore in the lead (why else the fierce
   resistance from the Republicans?).  The Republicans managed to stall
   it till it was too late.

 - Un-postmarked absentee ballots.  If these had been disqualified, as
   technically perhaps they should have been, Gore would likely have
   won.  They were counted, and I'm glad they were.

 - Altered ballot applications.  The republicans "fixed up" republican
   absentee ballot applications, but didn't allow democrats the same
   access.  Seriously sleazy, but I'm again glad those votes were
   counted.

 - Felon vote.  The list of felons generated for the state was so
   inaccurate that the state discarded it, probably allowing some felons
   not legally qualified to vote to do so.  This is the only break that
   went Gore's way.

There were also some complaints about blacks and hispanics being
discriminated against at the polling places in some areas, but I haven't
been able to figure out what the merits of that might be.  It'd be
another one that went against Gore.

So a lot of calls were made on technicalities.  Some of them, like not
recounting undervotes, seemed to me to be rather bad calls made wholely
on partisan grounds.

The "Bush won - stop whining" argument only makes sense if you accept
that Bush won.  Duh.  A more accurate statement would be "The voters may
not have picked Bush, but Jeb Bush, the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida
Legislature and random noise did, so stop whining."

The "you have to play by the rules" argument, that raises the importance
of technicalities above the importance of discerning the will of the
people is also bogus.  If you really believe that, then all those
unpostmarked military absentee ballots and altered ballot applications
should have been throw out, because although they represented the real
will of real voters, they were technically invalid.  Then Gore would
have won.

response 52 of 96:

Dec 14 21:26 UTC 2000

I'm game.

response 54 of 96:

Dec 14 23:09 UTC 2000

Re 50.  That inaccurate felon list was discarded only in a few counties,
maybe it was only in ONE county.  In all the other counties, thousands of
people, some number of whom were not felons, were struck from the rolls
and not allowed to vote.  The majority of these were African-American, and
hence, likely Gore voters.  (Not surprising because I'm sure the majority
of convicted felons in Florida are also African-American, and people who
were mistaken for convicted felons probably have similar names and live at
similar addresses.) 

The company that compiled the inaccurate list had close ties to the
Republican party.

So, this was a break for Bush, not for Gore.

response 56 of 96:

Dec 15 01:30 UTC 2000

See also my new item 207.

response 58 of 96:

Dec 15 06:28 UTC 2000

Won, not one.  silly me.  it's late.

response 60 of 96:

Dec 15 06:50 UTC 2000

I apologise, Steve.  I don't know why I decided "senna" was (also) a Richard;
I *do* know better.

response 62 of 96:

Dec 15 14:21 UTC 2000

I saw a pre-view for Saturday Night live where they were saying "and featuring
president-elect george dubya bush" and it showed Will Farrel I think, playing
Dubya who was playing with a ball of string like a kitten.

Oh, the comedy of the next 4 years is going to be SO easy...

response 64 of 96:

Dec 16 03:44 UTC 2000

re 50: "Gore got all the bad breaks."  You mean like having the
networks call him the winner in FL while polls in much of the
state were still open?

response 66 of 96:

Dec 16 06:00 UTC 2000

And yes, I did go and reread the responses, just to make sure.  There 
were brief flickers of actual discussion, but not many.

response 68 of 96:

Dec 16 19:00 UTC 2000

Re 64.  I wrote a response to this earlier, but it was lost when I lost
my connction.

What proportion of Florida is on Central Time?  Nine rural counties? 
"Much of the state" seems to overstate the case.

In theory, yes, this is a "break" which went Gore's way.

Nonethess, it's hard to imagine (1) a Bush voter (2) who hadn't voted by
the last hour of the day, (3) BUT was interested enough to tune into CNN
to see how the election was going, (4) heard Florida called for Gore, or
noticed the color of Florida on CNN's map of states, (5) decided not to
bother voting in the presidential election since the state had already
been decided. 

Since presumably this hypothetical individual lives in a rural area, he
probably doesn't live right across the street from the polling place. 
Certainly in Michigan rural voters have to drive a fair distance to get to
the schoolhouse or township hall where the polls are; I presume it's
similar in Florida.  So what's he doing, thirty minutes before the polls
close, sitting at home watching CNN (he cares about the election) when he
hasn't voted yet?

When Democrats complained about the "butterfly" ballot in Palm Beach
County, there were numerous actual people who stepped forward, despite
their embarrassment, to say that they had accidentally voted for Buchanan. 
Did anyone in extreme western Florida step forward and say, "yeah, I would
have voted for Bush, but CNN called the state for Gore, so I didn't
bother?"  I didn't hear of any.

What we're imagining here is someone who cared enough about the election
to let CNN's coverage affect his behavior, and yet who didn't care enough
about races like U.S. Senator, Congress, state legislature, etc. to
actually cast a vote.

Voters in many other states managed to find their way to the polls despite
the fact that nobody thought there was the slightest doubt about the
presidential outcome in their state.

Had I been a Bush operative on Election Night, sure, I would have been
outraged at CNN for calling Florida before every one of its polls had
closed.  And sure, I would have demanded that the call be retracted until
the last nine counties had closed.

BUT (not knowing everything that went down since then), I would have
assumed that CNN was probably right, that the state was probably going for
Gore.  My concern would have been, not Florida itself, but Missouri,
Wisconsin, Iowa, Washington, etc.  If CNN had been able to say "ALL of the
battleground states are going for Gore," that might have created a
little but of a bandwagon effect which could affect the views of voters in
other states.

As far as Florida goes, though, I doubt very much that the premature call
for Gore affected the Bush/Gore totals in more than single digits.  There
wasn't time.

response 70 of 96:

Dec 16 21:37 UTC 2000

        When was it that the TV networks where calling states for
a candidate by  noon?  They got lambbasted for that, and decided
on self control to not call a state until polls closed?

response 72 of 96:

Dec 18 02:55 UTC 2000

I agree with most of #68, but I think you have to be a little more careful
with the "rural counties" stereotype.  Rural counties have towns and cities
in them too, and a substantial portion of their populations live in such town
and cities, and are quite close to their polling places.  I don't think the
"travel time to polling places" things is really that big an issue for most
rural county residents.

response 74 of 96:

Dec 18 03:48 UTC 2000

Also possibly interesting is that the population of the ten counties
together is about 5% of Florida's total.  So, 95% of the population of
Florida is on Eastern Time, 5% on Central Time.

Michigan has the same problem: there are four counties on Central Time.
The four counties have a total of 82,978 people in 4,078 square miles.
That amounts to 0.86% of the state's total population.

Should networks refrain from "calling" Michigan statewide races until
polling places in those four Central Time counties have closed?

To some extent, I think this is an old-fashioned issue, from the days when
the television networks were the dominant news source.  Already, VNS's
survey results are not only leaked but spread like wildfire via email and
web sites.  A couple of election cycles from now, this will all look
pretty quaint.