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How Close Were US Presidential Elections?
Mike Sheppard writes "I'm a graduate student in Statistics at Michigan State University and spent some time analyzing past US presidential elections to determine how close they truly were. The mathematical procedures of Linear Programming and 0-1 Integer Programming were used to find the optimal solution to the question: 'What is the smallest number of total votes that need to be switched from one candidate to another, and from which states, to affect the outcome of the election?' Because of the way the popular and electoral votes interact, the outcome of the analysis had some surprising and intriguing results. For example, in 2004, 57,787 votes would have given us President Kerry; and in 2000, 269 votes would have given us President Gore. In all there have been 12 US Presidential elections that were decided by less than a 1% margin; meaning if less than 1% of the voters in certain states had changed their mind to the other candidate the outcome of the election would have been different."
read up
Al Gore actually won the 2000 popular election. Jeb Bush helped his brother cheat.
"Something very strange happened on election night to Deborah Tannenbaum, a Democratic Party official in Volusia County. At 10 p.m., she called the county elections department and learned that Al Gore was leading George W. Bush 83,000 votes to 62,000. But when she checked the county's Web site for an update half an hour later, she found a startling development: Gore's count had dropped by 16,000 votes, while an obscure Socialist candidate had picked up 10,000--all because of a single precinct with only 600 voters."
They're using their grammar skills there.
Gore could have maybe won his home state and made the whole recount moot.
Or maybe people just didn't like that insufferable douchebag.
So Gore would have done what? Invited Bin Laden to come visit New York and observe the destruction? Come on! You know Gore would have reacted exactly the same way Bush acted, and the way Clinton acted before him..... with military action.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Actually 122,267,553 votes were counted and of those 62,040,610 got what they wanted (ie. president Bush). That was 50.73% of the total.
Quite a bit more than "269 votes". I'm guessing you're a democrat, right ? If you feel so strongly about losing, perhaps it's time to get out of politics.