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Mathematics Says Romney and Santorum Tied In Iowa
Hugh Pickens writes "Presidential candidate Mitt Romney received eight more votes than candidate Rick Santorum or 0.007 percent of the total number of caucus votes in the Iowa caucus, 'eking out a victory' on the path to winning the Republican nomination for president but experts in statistics say Romney and Santorum actually tied. 'From a statistical point of view, you can't say Romney won any more than you can say Santorum won,' says Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University who studies election error. That's because in the Iowa caucus, where voters marked their choices with check marks or by writing the candidates' names in by hand, the error rate in counting the votes, which is also done by hand is orders of magnitude above the victory margin — around 0.5 to 1 percent. There are several sources of error that could easily render eight votes meaningless." (Read on for more.)
Hugh Pickens continues: "First, ballots sometimes stick to the bottom of ballot boxes when the boxes are overturned, and fail to be counted. Next, election officials occasionally misread messy handwriting, or tally their totals incorrectly. Finally officials can misjudge who a voter intended to vote for: 'You'd be surprised how often people place a check mark in an ambiguous place,' says Seife. Whether it's statistically significant or not, any official declaration of victory can have big ramifications. With political pundits regarding Romney's 'victory' as evidence that he's in a good position to win the Republican nomination, the failure to recognize a statistical tie in Iowa could impact the future of the country. 'It's Romney, not Santorum, who can head to New Hampshire claiming the win,' writes Nick Rizzo. 'But if you just counted the exact same votes all over again, there's a good chance the result would be different.'"
The only thing that matters is the number of delegates the canidates won. Romney, Santorum and Paul each won 7 delegates. Gingrich and Perry each won 2 delegates. Currently Romney has the most delegates because he has support from delegates not tied to elections. Romney has 18, Santorum has 8, Paul has 7 delegates total.
Because the results are not binding anyway, there's no need for a recount, or so the NYTimes says:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/no-need-for-recount-in-iowa-caucus/?scp=1&sq=iowa%20recount&st=cse
It's because the caucus votes don't really count. There's two layers of delegates between the voters and the people who vote who actually count. By the end the delegate voters generally vote for whoever is "clearly" going to win the nomination in the national races. The vote that occurred recently in Iowa is just for the media.
Nonsense. The Supreme Court already told us that states don't actually have to count votes, so long as state statute says they don't.
Just don't make the mistake of thinking you live in a democracy. In democracies, they count all the votes.
The qualifier is only shown after the second moderation. So if somebody moderates troll, and afterwards you moderate underrated, your moderation causes the "troll" qualifier to show (but increases the score back to 2)
Also, this year there is a proportional assignment of delegates based on the percent of vote received. Iowa has a total of 26 delegates, and 1,144 are needed to win the party nomination. At 1/26, there can be as much as 4% error in the vote and it shouldn't affect the delegate ratios.
CNN lists the following delegate votes:
The department was created via legislation and is under Congressional oversight.
no. The supreme court says that you can't continually recount votes until you get a result you like.
Bush won BOTH the original count, and the recount in Flordia. Both counts said he won. Nobody disputed that. What happened is Gore then asked for -another- recount (we're up to count #3 here) and the problem is he asked for a hand-recount, which wouldn't finish by the state-mandated deadline. The florida supreme court said "well we will just extend the deadline then." and the US supreme court said "uh, no, you can't randomly extend deadlines for recounts when we have two legitimate counts already in hand." because if gore had won that one, then Bush would have asked for a recount, or if gore had lost he probably would have asked for another one, and we'd still be waiting for results.
Stop parroting talking points. We're not talking about things that happened 400 years ago. These events happened within recent memory.
Yes, Gore only challenged and wanted recounts in the counties of major cities. That was his first mistake.
That, and the Florida constitution said all counties must submit their final count by the end of one week after the election. The state supreme court overrode that line of the constitution without giving a reason. So, that's where the US Supreme Court overturned it, after asking the state court again to give a justification, which they let lapse.
The SCUSA said that it was acceptable that the state statutes did not require all the votes to be counted. That is my problem. The number of votes left uncounted, was larger than the margin between the candidates' tallies. Therefore, it was not possible to know who won the election. I don't mean that literally all the votes need to be counted, I mean that figuratively all the votes need to be counted, by which I mean enough votes to be sure of the winner. If the margin between the candidates is X, then Florida need to count all but X-1 votes. Florida did not meet that threshold, and therefore I reject its election statutes as un-Constitutional; the SCUSA should have done the same.
I don't know what you mean by voter fraud. The votes were there, on paper, in a warehouse. They should have been counted. And eventually they were counted, in their entirety, and the winner was not the person who was certified by the state. It is a 100% perfect example of why all the votes must be counted.
What the newspapers* found is a bit more complicated than what you say. And amusing too.
If the recount that Gore had asked for, using his methodology, had gone forward, Bush would have extended his lead. So if SCOTUS had ruled the other way, Bush would have become president.
But, hold onto your hat, if the recount had gone forward, using Bush's methodology, Gore would have won by 3 votes.
And just to add to the confusion, if the recount had included discarded ballots from 2 counties, Gore would have won. The effect of ballots thrown out in other counties is unknown.
The net result? Who knows.
In 1960, under even more suspicious vote counting in Illinois, Nixon didn't demand the recount that historians say would have given him the White House. Shit happens. Some people are better at moving on.
* http://articles.cnn.com/2001-04-04/politics/florida.recount.01_1_ballots-without-presidential-votes-undercounted-ballots-miami-herald-and-usa?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS
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