> I asked myself why there why there were so many idiots who claimed that they voted wrong, and then didn't figure this out until they got home.
Does it take an idiot? There have been a number of times in my life that I took an exam and figured out about the time I got home that I had misunderstood a question and therefore gotten it wrong. Does that make me an idiot too?
Sure, knowing human nature, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it turns out that lots of liars are stepping forward now. But are they all liars? There were plenty of complaints on election day -- before the polls closed -- and the double-punched ballots tell a tale that does not need human testimony for support.
> The ballot followed the procedures outlined by law for laying out a ballor
Not. See this note on jurist, and read the part about allegations of a confusing ballot. IANAL, but it certainly sounds like the ballot does not conform to the requirements of Floridian state law.
> Instead, the dems us ed a telemarketing firm to stir the pot and get people to complain when it became apparent they they weren't going to win Florida.
Actually, the problem was reported long before the outcome of the election was clear. By 11:24 AM Florida time, there had already been enough complaints to prompt a FAX from the DNC to contact county officials, asking them to post a clarification. A note was then distributed by the county to the actual voting sites, arriving mostly between 1:00 and 2:00 PM. (I have seen at least once source claiming that the clarification never did reach all the sites.)
See th is Salon article for a pretty good review of the situation, including a link to a scan of the memo.
Also, now that a bit of information about the disqualified ballots is finally leaking out, it turns out that there was indeed a high fraction of Gore+Buchanan punches (over 2x the number of Gore+Bush punches, IIRC).
It is at best misleading for you to portray the current dispute as a post hoc attempt by the Democrats to throw a fair election.
> For starters, it wouldn't take a team of rocket scientists to clean-room clone the DTD to a level of functionality that'd satisfy most anyone.
Actually, a "clean-room" implementation, if possible at all, would have to have different tag names, or else you would get sued for violating the copyright. But with different tag names, it would not actually work with data tagged the original way. Those "open" documents would not be so open after all.
IMO, copyrighted DTDs will be the major weapon in the next generation of attempts to corner the market via proprietary data formats.
Alas, that's a vision somewhat different from the promise of XML.
> In any case, the recount results are skewing heavily to Gore, so my whole point may be moot. Let's hope so.
My dearest hope is that the recount will favor Gore, so we can see the two parties (and hundreds of Slashdotters!) swap sides on their positions as to whether there should be recounts, re-votes, court cases, etc., and start offering the same arguments that they were vigorously denouncing the previous day.
> That's because the big counties -- which went heavily to Gore -- have already reported. For the most part, the counties remaining are smaller, rural counties which were won handily by Bush.
As of late evening Florida time Thursday, the AP is reporting a diffence of 229 votes between the candidates, with only three counties left to be counted. That has only grown in Bush's favor by only five votes after the last few counties. The absentee voting will very likely swamp this.
> In 1996, after the Republican nomination was all-but sewn up for Bob Dole, Buchanan supporters in this area registered almost 9,000 votes for Pat. It was the primary, not the November election.
Of course, the Democratic primary was a non-issue in '96, so there may have been a temptation among Democrat voters to vote in the Republican primary just to muddy the waters.
Not to say I know, or even believe, that that was the case. My point is that the "facts" we are getting are slim and sometimes contradictory, and that the explanation of the facts still seems to be beyond reach.
That's why I support having the courts take a preliminary look at it. If it turns out to be inflated claims and sob stories, they can and should throw the case out. But the trouble reports are so common and so believable, and the stakes are so high, I think the courts should at least take a preliminary look at it. Even in the absence of lawsuits, the State of Florida should have shown the initiative to launch its own investigation. After all, it's the citizens of Florida who got rooked (or not, as the case may be).
> That having been said if Gore doesn't win it after the recount he just take the high road and bow out. This will actually be pretty good for the Dems anyway. Whichever party gets the whitehouse is going to loose big time during the mid-term elections. Plus, I have a sneaking feeling that Dubya in office for 4 years (if he even makes it that long...) will probably hand the Dems a nice chunk of votes in 2004. He really is a flaming idiot.
I generally agree with your post... in fact, I have already told friends off-line that I don't expect Bush to last a full four years. If you look at his dubious brainpower, his oft-reported "part time" approach to governership, his longstanding pattern of avoiding responsibility for his personal and political actions, his, errrm, "colorful" past lifestyle (admittedly relevant only in The Land of Investigative Reporters), his clintonesque way of lying^w avoiding the truth when it makes him look bad, his childish tantrums when things don't go to suit him (e.g., his complaint to the FEC about the first parody website that slipped through his domain-squatting blockade, and his abrupt abandonment of family and friends during his election night dinner out, when word about Florida first came across, and his response to Al's second phone call)... when you consider all this, and add in the grude the nation's democrats have over seven years of scorched-earth anti-Clinton investigations, his success at playing president does not seem to be a foregone conclusion.
However, I would like to make one point about this part of your post:
> That having been said if Gore doesn't win it after the recount he just take the high road and bow out.
Lots of pundits (and Republicans) are saying that in the mainstream media. But why is it up to Al to take the high road? Shouldn't it be equally incumbent (no pun!) on George to admit that there really were flaws in the Florida elections?
I'm not really convinced that either candidate has a natural right to bow out, or even to concede on election night, since it's really up to the voters rather than the candidates. That said, I would probably (grudgingly) respect either guy who bowed out before things got too tangled up in the courts.
Unfortunately, a few spot checks of CNN during the day today indicates that this has already become thoroughly politicized, and the odds of either side bowing out are becoming quite slim now. I suspect that Florida will make an official announcement by the end of next week, but I think we'll have court cases and appeals going on well past January 20th.
Does a party official's approval outweigh my right to a clear ballot? This shouldn't have anything to do with partisan interests. (Though it obviously already has.)
> At that point, it's unfair to the *other* 100,000,000 voters that none of *US* are allowed to reconsider our votes based on what we know of nationwide turnout.
You mean, like everyone west of the Rockies does during every national election?
> In other words, the e.c. is considerably more unstable and capricious than a direct election.
Or perhaps the reverse? Maybe the EC has a damping effect on oscillations of popular passions? What evidence that such a claim is any less accurate than yours? [Both are somewhat lacking in the evidence department!]
Moreover, as one pundit has pointed out, with direct election we would now be saddled with several thousand local lawsuits trying to garner a few hundred votes each, rather than a handful of lawsuits trying to garner a relatively large number of votes.
Also, according to that pundit, there would be more motivation for fraud. If every voting jurisdiction in the country accumulated a handful of fraudulent votes, the national total could be quite large, and the individual cases would be much harder to detect. Under the EC, fraud is only effective if it is massive enough within a single state to move that state from one candidate to another, and even then it pretty much has to happen in a largish "swing" state. Thus the EC reduces the number of opportunities, and makes the remaining opportunities less friendly to the crooks.
> There is a much greater chance that the true will of the people will not be reflected in the final result.
A casual reading of the US Constitution appears to show that the system was designed to reflect the will of the states, rather than the will of the people.
> For example, the electoral college has, throughout the course of US history, served to prolong and promote slavery and remove incentives for granting female sufferage or encouraging higher voter turnouts.
Can you show that the EC consistently supports bad causes and direct vote consistently supports good causes?
Are you aware that the world's first direct democracy, Athens, used to vote the death penalty on people it didn't like? Or that they voted genocide against the inhabitants of an island, reversed the vote the next day, and had to dispatch a double-fast courier to overtake the previous day's courier before the orders were carried out?
I don't think you can make any blanket claims about direct vote being a surer guarantee of ethical behavior than the EC system. Some of the FFs were quite wary of direct popular vote, and whether you agree with them or not, you have to admit that there were good historical reasons for their concerns.
> In any case, it's important to remember that, due in no small part to the popular belief that he was robbed in 1960, Nixon got his presidency in 1968. So too did the two candidates in our history who actually were "robbed"... Interesting to see what Gore will do...
I'm not sure I would want to win if I were one of the two contending candidates. Neither will have a strongly supportive legislature. Both will be under a cloud of possibly winning on the basis of fraud, possibly with the collusion of partisan tampering from the {Clinton,JBush} administration. Gore would be further tainted with being a crybaby who demanded a re-run, Bush with having won in spite of losing the national popular vote.
Moreover, both have already been under a cloud due to suspicions about their personal integrity, in ways that have nothing to do with the problems with the election.
I suspect it is going to be a miserable four years for whoever gets the job, and unless he does a remarkable job of handling some big crisis during his term, will not likely get re-elected.
As you hint, the politically smart move might be to concede after a weak pro forma protest, and then run again on the "I had the mandate, and would have done better than that loser anyway" ticket in four years.
> In 1996, 15,000 ballots were thrown away in Palm Beach county because people punched two candidates.
If this is true (I haven't seen it anywhere except/., and the number varies between the reports), if it is true, it would be interesting to know whether the same "butterfly" style ballot was used in '96. Without more details, your argument could be used to support either side of the case. [James Baker was just shown on PBS defending the ballot on the grounds that it has been used before, but he did not give the details of when and where.]
> BTW, not all those "two candidate" votes were Gore and Buchanan.
I hate to ask you for a source on that, because demanding a source is a favorite tactic of trolls, but I've really been trying to find statistics on that distribution, and so far I have not even been able to find out whether the ballots still exist.
Also, what do you mean by "not all"? Some background noise might be expected, but it should either be randomly distributed or else (presumably) tend to pair off candidates with similar political philosophies. If the pairings were essentially random, then I would buy it as noise. If they tended to be Bush-Buchanan or Gore-Nader, then I would buy it as ill-informed voters attempting to pick a set of favorites. I would not object to disqualifying all ballots in those categories.
But if you get lots of Bush-Nader or Gore-Buchanan pairs, beyond a random distribution, then I would suspect a problem with the system. A large spike of Gore-Buchanan double punches would be particularly revealing, in light of the allegations of a confusing ballot.
FWIW, I call on the State of Florida to publish the details of the 19,000 disqualified ballots.
> Just for the record, their father stole the 1960 presidential election for Kennedy away from Nixon.
The telenews is now reporting that not everyone agrees with this historical interpretation. I don't think anyone is disputing the corruption of the Daley machine, but rather, disputing whether it really was enough to throw the election.
I don't know anything about the matter; I'm just reporting this as another FYI picked up for the mainstream news media. Take it for whatever you think it's worth, or post more info if you think you have something more reliable.
> Look: they only discovered their "mistake" after they dropped their ballot in the box.
The known facts (such as they are) do not support this.
You can't double-punch your ballot after it goes into the bin.
People are reporting asking an election official for help, and getting "I don't know either" for an answer.
People are reporting asking for a second ballot (as you suggest), and being refused.
People are reporting being told that their ballot would be thrown out if they spent more than five minutes in the booth.
All the stories may or may not be hearsay, and even if someone is actually making the reported claims, they may or may not be true. That's why a courtroom is the only legitimate solution.
Notice that recounts are also going on in a couple of states narrowly won by Gore. I support this wholeheartedly, and if error or fraud is found, I support public investigations, re-votes wherever necessary, and draconian penalties for fraud in those cases too.
I don't pretend not to be biased against a certain moronic loser who always looks (and acts) like he just woke up, but I insist on a legitimate election regardless of who it puts into office. You don't select the President of the USA on the basis of error and fraud.
FWIW, exit polls are exactly why I think there really is something wrong in Florida.
Ignore the news reports and anecdotes; these could easily be shrugged off as reporters grasping for a scoop and the whingeing of sore losers.
But exit polls. The Voters News Service originally gave the state to AG on the basis of exit polls. They retracted after complaints from the Bush HQ, but that was well after the polls had closed, and the exit polls weren't changing anymore. Now the actual results do not reflect the exit polls that the original prediction was based on.
Think about it. Voter enters booth. Voter mistakenly votes for Buchanan. [Optional step: Voter recognizes mistake and re-punches for Gore.] Voter exits booth. Voter tells VNS surveyer that s/he voted for Gore. VNS tallies samples and predicts a win for Gore. Election workers tally votes, find a surprisingly high total for Buchanan and a startlingly high number of double-punched ballots in Palm Beach, and do not find a win for Gore.
The hypothesis leads to results that fit the observations exactly.
You still need to test the hypothesis, though. Have the 19,000 double-punched ballots been destroyed? If not, how many of them show a Gore-Buchanan combination? Any other suggestions for testing the hypothesis?
> or else Florida's electoral votes must be thrown out to prevent a Constitutional crisis.
I hardly see how you can avoid a constitutional crisis by throwing out a state's votes. There certainly isn't any constitutional basis for such a move.
> If they're thrown out, that means that it becomes a matter of nobody garnering at least half of the electoral votes and thus is up to the House.
Ah, but the XIIth amendment says The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed. If Florida appoints electors, they get to vote. If Florida does not appoint electors it does not go to the House after all; Al Gore wins on a simple majority of the whole number of Electors appointed.
I still reject the scam^w scheme, even though it now puts "my" man in office. IMO, the only correct solution is to get the correct number of votes from the good citizens of Florida.
> In effect, denying Bush his rightful win and shortening his deserved term.
GWB doesn't have a rightful win without an electoral win, he doesn't have an electoral win without Florida, and he doesn't have Florida unless Florida's laws and voters say he does.
> The Founding Fathers also rejected the idea of women & blacks voting.
Touché.
FWIW, I don't have any big emotional stake in the EC. I don't object to it, but I won't cry if they change it either. It's a human institution; there's no natural right or wrong involved.
> Um...here's a good question: why the hell are we using punch cards still for something as important as an election?
<informative>
There are some serious problems with electronic voting. For a start on the topic, visit the comp.risks newsgroup and read the last couple of journal posts there.
Interestingly, among the comments is one insisting that all voting software must be open source. But there are lots of other interesting issues. Perhaps biggest of all being the question of whether legislators would understand the difference between "desirable" features and "necessary" features in an e-voting system.
</informative>
> Shouldn't we be using technology that isn't 50 years old?
<funny>
Erm, I think you're trying to apply the Microsoft anti-Linux Howto to the wrong problem.
</funny>
IMO we should use a system that provides a trail that the voter can invoke to prove his/her vote (but that cannot be traced backward to identify how a given voter voted).
For example, use a paper ballot with a number, and a detachable tag with the same number. (That is probably a naive/buggy solution, but) if you had something like that that really worked, the voters of Palm Beach could now use their tags to demonstrate that the county's results did/didn't reflect their actual preferences.
> The ballot was approved by a democratic official
That's irrelevant. The official in question might have the same cavalier attitude toward user interfaces that so many/.ers in this thread are displaying.
At any rate, is the party system so entrenched that a party official speaks for the voters in his/her jurisdiction? This is not, IMO, a party issue at all. It's a matter of getting the correct numbers for the will of the people.
> Nixon, being the leader that he was, got up and said that he wouldn't challenge the vote because it was in the best interest of the office of the presidency to let it stand.
I'm not so sure Nixon did the right thing. Was the election his to give away?
I suppose there's something to be said for losing with dignity, but in elections the only reasonable thing to do is insist on the correct result.
> Kinda funny that the man later nearly brought down with an impeachment cares more about the rule of law...
FWIW, at least one pundit (may they all rot in Hell) has claimed a cause and effect relationship between his concession in 1960 and Watergate. According to that theory, it was his decade-long rage at having been "robbed" of the presidency that led to his sub-legal methods of making sure he didn't get "robbed" again.
> throw out the ENTIRE 25 electoral votes in Florida as if they had gone to a different candidate
And this is justice for the voters how?
> the Constitution says it is up to the newly elected House of Representatives to select the President. It seems the only way to ensure the rule of law is obeyed.
How convenient. Why doesn't the "rule of law" insist on determining the correct vote? That would let us leave the SC out of it altogether.
Slashdot Mirror
> I asked myself why there why there were so many idiots who claimed that they voted wrong, and then didn't figure this out until they got home.
Does it take an idiot? There have been a number of times in my life that I took an exam and figured out about the time I got home that I had misunderstood a question and therefore gotten it wrong. Does that make me an idiot too?
Sure, knowing human nature, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if it turns out that lots of liars are stepping forward now. But are they all liars? There were plenty of complaints on election day -- before the polls closed -- and the double-punched ballots tell a tale that does not need human testimony for support.
> The ballot followed the procedures outlined by law for laying out a ballor
Not. See this note on jurist, and read the part about allegations of a confusing ballot. IANAL, but it certainly sounds like the ballot does not conform to the requirements of Floridian state law.
> Instead, the dems us ed a telemarketing firm to stir the pot and get people to complain when it became apparent they they weren't going to win Florida.
Actually, the problem was reported long before the outcome of the election was clear. By 11:24 AM Florida time, there had already been enough complaints to prompt a FAX from the DNC to contact county officials, asking them to post a clarification. A note was then distributed by the county to the actual voting sites, arriving mostly between 1:00 and 2:00 PM. (I have seen at least once source claiming that the clarification never did reach all the sites.)
See th is Salon article for a pretty good review of the situation, including a link to a scan of the memo.
Also, now that a bit of information about the disqualified ballots is finally leaking out, it turns out that there was indeed a high fraction of Gore+Buchanan punches (over 2x the number of Gore+Bush punches, IIRC).
It is at best misleading for you to portray the current dispute as a post hoc attempt by the Democrats to throw a fair election.
> hat my mother didn't walk in, and that Vivian Hsu would!!
Nice link. Nice pix of Vivian. (Now I know what she looks like with clothes on!)
> "No matter what your position or point of view, you can always find a pithy quote to support it." -- Me
I disagree, but unfortunately I can't find a pithy quote to support my position.
> For starters, it wouldn't take a team of rocket scientists to clean-room clone the DTD to a level of functionality that'd satisfy most anyone.
Actually, a "clean-room" implementation, if possible at all, would have to have different tag names, or else you would get sued for violating the copyright. But with different tag names, it would not actually work with data tagged the original way. Those "open" documents would not be so open after all.
IMO, copyrighted DTDs will be the major weapon in the next generation of attempts to corner the market via proprietary data formats.
Alas, that's a vision somewhat different from the promise of XML.
> In any case, the recount results are skewing heavily to Gore, so my whole point may be moot. Let's hope so.
My dearest hope is that the recount will favor Gore, so we can see the two parties (and hundreds of Slashdotters!) swap sides on their positions as to whether there should be recounts, re-votes, court cases, etc., and start offering the same arguments that they were vigorously denouncing the previous day.
> That's because the big counties -- which went heavily to Gore -- have already reported. For the most part, the counties remaining are smaller, rural counties which were won handily by Bush.
As of late evening Florida time Thursday, the AP is reporting a diffence of 229 votes between the candidates, with only three counties left to be counted. That has only grown in Bush's favor by only five votes after the last few counties. The absentee voting will very likely swamp this.
> In 1996, after the Republican nomination was all-but sewn up for Bob Dole, Buchanan supporters in this area registered almost 9,000 votes for Pat. It was the primary, not the November election.
Of course, the Democratic primary was a non-issue in '96, so there may have been a temptation among Democrat voters to vote in the Republican primary just to muddy the waters.
Not to say I know, or even believe, that that was the case. My point is that the "facts" we are getting are slim and sometimes contradictory, and that the explanation of the facts still seems to be beyond reach.
That's why I support having the courts take a preliminary look at it. If it turns out to be inflated claims and sob stories, they can and should throw the case out. But the trouble reports are so common and so believable, and the stakes are so high, I think the courts should at least take a preliminary look at it. Even in the absence of lawsuits, the State of Florida should have shown the initiative to launch its own investigation. After all, it's the citizens of Florida who got rooked (or not, as the case may be).
> That having been said if Gore doesn't win it after the recount he just take the high road and bow out. This will actually be pretty good for the Dems anyway. Whichever party gets the whitehouse is going to loose big time during the mid-term elections. Plus, I have a sneaking feeling that Dubya in office for 4 years (if he even makes it that long...) will probably hand the Dems a nice chunk of votes in 2004. He really is a flaming idiot.
I generally agree with your post... in fact, I have already told friends off-line that I don't expect Bush to last a full four years. If you look at his dubious brainpower, his oft-reported "part time" approach to governership, his longstanding pattern of avoiding responsibility for his personal and political actions, his, errrm, "colorful" past lifestyle (admittedly relevant only in The Land of Investigative Reporters), his clintonesque way of lying^w avoiding the truth when it makes him look bad, his childish tantrums when things don't go to suit him (e.g., his complaint to the FEC about the first parody website that slipped through his domain-squatting blockade, and his abrupt abandonment of family and friends during his election night dinner out, when word about Florida first came across, and his response to Al's second phone call)... when you consider all this, and add in the grude the nation's democrats have over seven years of scorched-earth anti-Clinton investigations, his success at playing president does not seem to be a foregone conclusion.
However, I would like to make one point about this part of your post:
> That having been said if Gore doesn't win it after the recount he just take the high road and bow out.
Lots of pundits (and Republicans) are saying that in the mainstream media. But why is it up to Al to take the high road? Shouldn't it be equally incumbent (no pun!) on George to admit that there really were flaws in the Florida elections?
I'm not really convinced that either candidate has a natural right to bow out, or even to concede on election night, since it's really up to the voters rather than the candidates. That said, I would probably (grudgingly) respect either guy who bowed out before things got too tangled up in the courts.
Unfortunately, a few spot checks of CNN during the day today indicates that this has already become thoroughly politicized, and the odds of either side bowing out are becoming quite slim now. I suspect that Florida will make an official announcement by the end of next week, but I think we'll have court cases and appeals going on well past January 20th.
> Both parties approved them in advance.
Does a party official's approval outweigh my right to a clear ballot? This shouldn't have anything to do with partisan interests. (Though it obviously already has.)
> At that point, it's unfair to the *other* 100,000,000 voters that none of *US* are allowed to reconsider our votes based on what we know of nationwide turnout.
You mean, like everyone west of the Rockies does during every national election?
> In other words, the e.c. is considerably more unstable and capricious than a direct election.
Or perhaps the reverse? Maybe the EC has a damping effect on oscillations of popular passions? What evidence that such a claim is any less accurate than yours? [Both are somewhat lacking in the evidence department!]
Moreover, as one pundit has pointed out, with direct election we would now be saddled with several thousand local lawsuits trying to garner a few hundred votes each, rather than a handful of lawsuits trying to garner a relatively large number of votes.
Also, according to that pundit, there would be more motivation for fraud. If every voting jurisdiction in the country accumulated a handful of fraudulent votes, the national total could be quite large, and the individual cases would be much harder to detect. Under the EC, fraud is only effective if it is massive enough within a single state to move that state from one candidate to another, and even then it pretty much has to happen in a largish "swing" state. Thus the EC reduces the number of opportunities, and makes the remaining opportunities less friendly to the crooks.
> There is a much greater chance that the true will of the people will not be reflected in the final result.
A casual reading of the US Constitution appears to show that the system was designed to reflect the will of the states, rather than the will of the people.
> For example, the electoral college has, throughout the course of US history, served to prolong and promote slavery and remove incentives for granting female sufferage or encouraging higher voter turnouts.
Can you show that the EC consistently supports bad causes and direct vote consistently supports good causes?
Are you aware that the world's first direct democracy, Athens, used to vote the death penalty on people it didn't like? Or that they voted genocide against the inhabitants of an island, reversed the vote the next day, and had to dispatch a double-fast courier to overtake the previous day's courier before the orders were carried out?
I don't think you can make any blanket claims about direct vote being a surer guarantee of ethical behavior than the EC system. Some of the FFs were quite wary of direct popular vote, and whether you agree with them or not, you have to admit that there were good historical reasons for their concerns.
> In any case, it's important to remember that, due in no small part to the popular belief that he was robbed in 1960, Nixon got his presidency in 1968. So too did the two candidates in our history who actually were "robbed"... Interesting to see what Gore will do...
I'm not sure I would want to win if I were one of the two contending candidates. Neither will have a strongly supportive legislature. Both will be under a cloud of possibly winning on the basis of fraud, possibly with the collusion of partisan tampering from the {Clinton,JBush} administration. Gore would be further tainted with being a crybaby who demanded a re-run, Bush with having won in spite of losing the national popular vote.
Moreover, both have already been under a cloud due to suspicions about their personal integrity, in ways that have nothing to do with the problems with the election.
I suspect it is going to be a miserable four years for whoever gets the job, and unless he does a remarkable job of handling some big crisis during his term, will not likely get re-elected.
As you hint, the politically smart move might be to concede after a weak pro forma protest, and then run again on the "I had the mandate, and would have done better than that loser anyway" ticket in four years.
> Bush | | Buchanon Gore | ^ page fold
Was that your entry into the obfuscated C code contest?
> In 1996, 15,000 ballots were thrown away in Palm Beach county because people punched two candidates.
/., and the number varies between the reports), if it is true, it would be interesting to know whether the same "butterfly" style ballot was used in '96. Without more details, your argument could be used to support either side of the case. [James Baker was just shown on PBS defending the ballot on the grounds that it has been used before, but he did not give the details of when and where.]
If this is true (I haven't seen it anywhere except
> BTW, not all those "two candidate" votes were Gore and Buchanan.
I hate to ask you for a source on that, because demanding a source is a favorite tactic of trolls, but I've really been trying to find statistics on that distribution, and so far I have not even been able to find out whether the ballots still exist.
Also, what do you mean by "not all"? Some background noise might be expected, but it should either be randomly distributed or else (presumably) tend to pair off candidates with similar political philosophies. If the pairings were essentially random, then I would buy it as noise. If they tended to be Bush-Buchanan or Gore-Nader, then I would buy it as ill-informed voters attempting to pick a set of favorites. I would not object to disqualifying all ballots in those categories.
But if you get lots of Bush-Nader or Gore-Buchanan pairs, beyond a random distribution, then I would suspect a problem with the system. A large spike of Gore-Buchanan double punches would be particularly revealing, in light of the allegations of a confusing ballot.
FWIW, I call on the State of Florida to publish the details of the 19,000 disqualified ballots.
> Just for the record, their father stole the 1960 presidential election for Kennedy away from Nixon.
The telenews is now reporting that not everyone agrees with this historical interpretation. I don't think anyone is disputing the corruption of the Daley machine, but rather, disputing whether it really was enough to throw the election.
I don't know anything about the matter; I'm just reporting this as another FYI picked up for the mainstream news media. Take it for whatever you think it's worth, or post more info if you think you have something more reliable.
> Look: they only discovered their "mistake" after they dropped their ballot in the box.
The known facts (such as they are) do not support this.
You can't double-punch your ballot after it goes into the bin.
People are reporting asking an election official for help, and getting "I don't know either" for an answer.
People are reporting asking for a second ballot (as you suggest), and being refused.
People are reporting being told that their ballot would be thrown out if they spent more than five minutes in the booth.
All the stories may or may not be hearsay, and even if someone is actually making the reported claims, they may or may not be true. That's why a courtroom is the only legitimate solution.
Notice that recounts are also going on in a couple of states narrowly won by Gore. I support this wholeheartedly, and if error or fraud is found, I support public investigations, re-votes wherever necessary, and draconian penalties for fraud in those cases too.
I don't pretend not to be biased against a certain moronic loser who always looks (and acts) like he just woke up, but I insist on a legitimate election regardless of who it puts into office. You don't select the President of the USA on the basis of error and fraud.
>> I hope you're not in the business of designing computer interfaces.
> Or worse, airport ground traffic control systems and proceedures.
Or missile launch systems.
> Any exit polls for that?
FWIW, exit polls are exactly why I think there really is something wrong in Florida.
Ignore the news reports and anecdotes; these could easily be shrugged off as reporters grasping for a scoop and the whingeing of sore losers.
But exit polls. The Voters News Service originally gave the state to AG on the basis of exit polls. They retracted after complaints from the Bush HQ, but that was well after the polls had closed, and the exit polls weren't changing anymore. Now the actual results do not reflect the exit polls that the original prediction was based on.
Think about it. Voter enters booth. Voter mistakenly votes for Buchanan. [Optional step: Voter recognizes mistake and re-punches for Gore.] Voter exits booth. Voter tells VNS surveyer that s/he voted for Gore. VNS tallies samples and predicts a win for Gore. Election workers tally votes, find a surprisingly high total for Buchanan and a startlingly high number of double-punched ballots in Palm Beach, and do not find a win for Gore.
The hypothesis leads to results that fit the observations exactly.
You still need to test the hypothesis, though. Have the 19,000 double-punched ballots been destroyed? If not, how many of them show a Gore-Buchanan combination? Any other suggestions for testing the hypothesis?
> or else Florida's electoral votes must be thrown out to prevent a Constitutional crisis.
I hardly see how you can avoid a constitutional crisis by throwing out a state's votes. There certainly isn't any constitutional basis for such a move.
> If they're thrown out, that means that it becomes a matter of nobody garnering at least half of the electoral votes and thus is up to the House.
Ah, but the XIIth amendment says The person having the greatest number of votes for President, shall be the President, if such number be a majority of the whole number of Electors appointed . If Florida appoints electors, they get to vote. If Florida does not appoint electors it does not go to the House after all; Al Gore wins on a simple majority of the whole number of Electors appointed.
I still reject the scam^w scheme, even though it now puts "my" man in office. IMO, the only correct solution is to get the correct number of votes from the good citizens of Florida.
> In effect, denying Bush his rightful win and shortening his deserved term.
GWB doesn't have a rightful win without an electoral win, he doesn't have an electoral win without Florida, and he doesn't have Florida unless Florida's laws and voters say he does.
> The Founding Fathers also rejected the idea of women & blacks voting.
Touché.
FWIW, I don't have any big emotional stake in the EC. I don't object to it, but I won't cry if they change it either. It's a human institution; there's no natural right or wrong involved.
> It would be good to check there DNA as well to confirm there are truly his children.
That's exactly what his girlfriend wanted, though personally I think there should be a statute of limitatons on this kind of case.
> Um...here's a good question: why the hell are we using punch cards still for something as important as an election?
<informative>
There are some serious problems with electronic voting. For a start on the topic, visit the comp.risks newsgroup and read the last couple of journal posts there.
Interestingly, among the comments is one insisting that all voting software must be open source. But there are lots of other interesting issues. Perhaps biggest of all being the question of whether legislators would understand the difference between "desirable" features and "necessary" features in an e-voting system.
</informative>
> Shouldn't we be using technology that isn't 50 years old?
<funny>
Erm, I think you're trying to apply the Microsoft anti-Linux Howto to the wrong problem.
</funny>
IMO we should use a system that provides a trail that the voter can invoke to prove his/her vote (but that cannot be traced backward to identify how a given voter voted).
For example, use a paper ballot with a number, and a detachable tag with the same number. (That is probably a naive/buggy solution, but) if you had something like that that really worked, the voters of Palm Beach could now use their tags to demonstrate that the county's results did/didn't reflect their actual preferences.
> The ballot was approved by a democratic official
/.ers in this thread are displaying.
That's irrelevant. The official in question might have the same cavalier attitude toward user interfaces that so many
At any rate, is the party system so entrenched that a party official speaks for the voters in his/her jurisdiction? This is not, IMO, a party issue at all. It's a matter of getting the correct numbers for the will of the people.
> Nixon, being the leader that he was, got up and said that he wouldn't challenge the vote because it was in the best interest of the office of the presidency to let it stand.
...
I'm not so sure Nixon did the right thing. Was the election his to give away?
I suppose there's something to be said for losing with dignity, but in elections the only reasonable thing to do is insist on the correct result.
> Kinda funny that the man later nearly brought down with an impeachment cares more about the rule of law
FWIW, at least one pundit (may they all rot in Hell) has claimed a cause and effect relationship between his concession in 1960 and Watergate. According to that theory, it was his decade-long rage at having been "robbed" of the presidency that led to his sub-legal methods of making sure he didn't get "robbed" again.
> throw out the ENTIRE 25 electoral votes in Florida as if they had gone to a different candidate
And this is justice for the voters how?
> the Constitution says it is up to the newly elected House of Representatives to select the President. It seems the only way to ensure the rule of law is obeyed.
How convenient. Why doesn't the "rule of law" insist on determining the correct vote? That would let us leave the SC out of it altogether.