Who wone Florida?

[rockoon]

Since assumptions have already been OK'd by the rodents here.. you may not want to know:

The actual numbers for the Florida oversea's ballots (I presume this does not include all absentee ballots) is 1380 to 750 in favor of Bush.


Back to The List:

8,000 incorrectly placed on this list.

Florida voter turnout stats: 11,774,000 of voting age, 5,963,110
voted. I'll just go with a nice easy 50% ok? So 4,000 were stopped at the polls in the state.

Miami-Dade county consists of 20% African Americans. If these 4,000 were selected randomly then 800 of them were black.

But of course the claim is that they were not selected randomly. Does anybody have any hard statistics?

 

[RandFan]

It's a statistical tie. There's no way of telling if more people actually voted for Bush or Gore, because the percent error of the voting methods used is vastly higher than the tiny percentage of votes that determined the election. Anyone who has some experience in writing up scientific experiments will tell you it's laughable to make any conclusion based on such data.

Any sane system would have at least allowed for a second vote.

I agree completely that the vote was a statistical tie. However I'm not sure how a second vote would have solved the poblem. Could you clarify?

 

[Nasarius]

I agree completely that the vote was a statistical tie. However I'm not sure how a second vote would have solved the poblem. Could you clarify?

It wouldn't have necessarily solved the problem, which is why I said "at least". But if there had been an opportunity for a second vote, I'm guessing that more people would have turned out to vote, and they would have been more careful in marking their ballots. It might have still been a tie, in which case...I don't know.
This is probably the only good argument as to why we need computerized voting (a well-designed system with the source code publicly available, of course). When you're only handling a few thousand votes in each location, any "glitches" are highly unlikely, so the margin of error should be very close to zero, excluding voter mistakes. Tampering is another matter, though.

 

[Jocko]

It wouldn't have necessarily solved the problem, which is why I said "at least". But if there had been an opportunity for a second vote, I'm guessing that more people would have turned out to vote, and they would have been more careful in marking their ballots.

Nationally, or just in Florida?

 

[wjousts]

Nationally, or just in Florida?

I think you've just hit the flaw in the idea of a second vote. It wouldn't seem fair or right to only have a second vote in Florida and not in the rest of the country since people in Florida would be voting while knowing the result in the rest of the country and the effect that Florida would have on the outcome. But a nationwide second vote would be hugely expensive and hard to organize in a short period of time.
The best outcome might have been if the supreme court had the authority to split the electoral college votes and give half to each candidate.

 

[gnome]

Since assumptions have already been OK'd by the rodents here.. you may not want to know:

The actual numbers for the Florida oversea's ballots (I presume this does not include all absentee ballots) is 1380 to 750 in favor of Bush.


Back to The List:

8,000 incorrectly placed on this list.

Florida voter turnout stats: 11,774,000 of voting age, 5,963,110
voted. I'll just go with a nice easy 50% ok? So 4,000 were stopped at the polls in the state.

Miami-Dade county consists of 20% African Americans. If these 4,000 were selected randomly then 800 of them were black.

But of course the claim is that they were not selected randomly. Does anybody have any hard statistics?

I do not have any hard statistics, but...

African American voters were placed on purge lists more often and more erroneously than Hispanic or white voters. For instance, in the state’s largest county, Miami-Dade, more than 65 percent of the names on the purge list were African Americans, who represented only 20.4 percent of the population. Hispanics were 57.4 percent of the population, but only 16.6 percent of the purge list; whites were 77.6 percent of the population but 17.6 percent of those purged.

--US Commission on Civil Rights, Voting Irregularities in Florida During the 2000 Presidential Election

 

[gnome]

It's been a while since I've heard election conspiracy theory, but if I remember correctly, the theory goes that the cases of people who were incorrectly designated as "felons" occurred in disproportionatly higher numbers in those Florida counties (and other states, I believe) that predominately favored the Democratic party.

I'm not claiming that its true, that's just my understanding of the theory.

The conspiracy doesn't have to be that complicated. In fact, I have perused a lot of the sites discussing the purge list issue... and have not seen this specific allegation.

The strongest allegations that I see (and this is not a very complicated conspiracy) is that state election officials, right up to their boss Kathryn Harris, were informed of the problems with the list and did little to clarify the matter, knowing it would lead to many voters being turned away incorrectly.

The only "conspiracy" action required to deliver the close vote to Bush would be to sit on her hands, instead of taking appropriate action on the warning.

 

[Doghouse Reilly]

I am not particularly well informed regarding this whole issue, but does anyone have any comments on the arugement that the fact that the networks prematurely announced a Gore win caused many republicans to NOT bother going to the polls to vote?
Personally I can picture myself becoming demoralized and not bothering to vote if I'd heard already that the other candidate had won, but I suppose this could just as easily have led to Gore supporters not turning out since they thought his win was assured already.

 

[BobK]

Gnome,

A quick question.

20.4% African American + 57.4% Hispanic + 77.6% White = 155.4% of the population. What's up with that?

Did you cut and paste your quote from the site or did you make a typo somewhere?

 

[gnome]

Gnome,

A quick question.

20.4% African American + 57.4% Hispanic + 77.6% White = 155.4% of the population. What's up with that?

Did you cut and paste your quote from the site or did you make a typo somewhere?

Oh, that is very interesting. The error seems to be on the site itself. Does anyone have the real demographic of that area?

 

[garys_2k]

Oh, that is very interesting. Does anyone have the real demographic of that area?

Next question: Does the demographic breakdown of the "exclude" list match the demographic breakdown of those convicted of felonies or of having other voter-qualifying disabilities? IOW, just because a certain group is present at a given fractional rate on that list does not imply that that rate is wrong wrt the cause for being on that list.

 

[gnome]

I found this:

http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/12/12086.html

It seems to repeat the error--but based on some of the breakdowns I have seen on other sites--what seems to account for the difference is that the groups are not mutually exclusive.

Edited to add: it's there in the footnotes--

(b) Hispanics may be of any race, so also are included in applicable race categories.

The groups are definitely not mutually exclusive. So, likely no error.

 

[Tricky]

The system that would work (and they use it in some places like Australia) is to have everybody vote for first and second choices, or even put all the candidates in a ranked order. If your first vote isn't one of the top two, your vote goes to your second choice. That would even empower third party candidates because people would not feel like if they voted for them that their vote would be wasted.

Probably for that reason, the current parties would never let it pass.

 

[Kerberos]

Gnome,

A quick question.

20.4% African American + 57.4% Hispanic + 77.6% White = 155.4% of the population. What's up with that?

Florida is overpopulated.

 

[Nasarius]

Okay, so maybe a second vote might not have been an ideal solution. In that case, here's an open question:

What should have been done after it became apparent that the vote was so close as to throw the result into serious doubt?

Personally, I don't know how it could have been handled differently. No amount of recounting would change the fact that it's "too close to call".

 

[Jocko]

I think you've just hit the flaw in the idea of a second vote. It wouldn't seem fair or right to only have a second vote in Florida and not in the rest of the country since people in Florida would be voting while knowing the result in the rest of the country and the effect that Florida would have on the outcome. But a nationwide second vote would be hugely expensive and hard to organize in a short period of time.

A national re-vote would be the only way to do it. There were other states that were "statistical ties" (of course, I can't remember which now but there were 3 or 4)... so who's to say only the FLORIDA votes were the deciding ones? Just because they dragged their feet the longest during the recounts?

A Florida-only re-vote would amount to one state selecting the next president, not by circumstance (as it actually happened) but by design. The SCOTUS and population would never tolerate that.

 

[Cain]

I agree with just about everything you say about the electoral college and the senate. I'd also add the the electoral college also puts all the focus on a handful of "battleground" states which puts the wishes of anybody in a solidly blue or red state on the back burner. It doesn't make sense for Bush or Kerry to try and reach out to Texas voters because that state (the second largest in the country) is going firmly for Bush. That means the issues of Texas voters are being completely ignored.

Precisely. People from small states, along with apologists for the Electoral College, charge that California, Texas and New York would "oppress" Wyoming and Alaska, which is why the brilliant Founding Fathers devised the current system (maybe with a touch of help from God). Of course that destroys a candidate's incentive to cater to the needs and wishes of possibly millions of people. So West Virginia and Pennsylvania get their steel tariffs; the Bush administration is willing to accede to environmental measures in Florida, but not California. Worse, all that talk about the small states ignores the reality that tax dollars are actually transferred from the coastal areas to the "heartland". Result: New Jersey gets screwed and New Mexico gets a nice military base. Speaking of New Jersey, it was the Garden State that originally proposed all members of the union have an equal number of votes (in contradistinction with Virginia which wanted votes based on population). Today the political irony is that New Jersey's population exceeds Virgina's.

The trouble with the direct election is that if a direct election ended with a margin of a few hundred votes in would result in a NATIONWIDE recount. That would be a major headache.

I agree with Tricky on Australia's rank voting system. That's a good idea and we should be open to change, as we were during the progressive era one-hundred years ago when Australian balloting and direct elections of Senators passed as constitutional amendments.

I do not see cost as a major issue, nor the possibility of a second nation-wide vote as a compelling factor. (Recounts, I would think, are confined only to where suspicious voting occured.) Who cares if it's expensive? It's difficult to imagine a process more important than free and fair elections.

 

[Furious]

I am not particularly well informed regarding this whole issue, but does anyone have any comments on the arugement that the fact that the networks prematurely announced a Gore win caused many republicans to NOT bother going to the polls to vote?
Personally I can picture myself becoming demoralized and not bothering to vote if I'd heard already that the other candidate had won, but I suppose this could just as easily have led to Gore supporters not turning out since they thought his win was assured already.

I believe the current protocol by media outlets is to not announce a winner until the polls are actually closed, but to predict the winner based on early reported results or exit polling.

This does not stop them from showing leads or making comments on who they expect to win though.

Also, it can have a reverse effect. I seem to remember a factoid that during the Nixon/Kennedy election, Democrats in California thought they had the election in the bag after it was announced Kennedy won Texas and didn't bother going to the polls because California was thought to be a Democratic lock. Nixon then subsequently won California making the election much closer than it might have been.

The electoral breakdown of that election seems to reflect that theory.

 

[Jocko]

Okay, so maybe a second vote might not have been an ideal solution. In that case, here's an open question:

What should have been done after it became apparent that the vote was so close as to throw the result into serious doubt?

Personally, I don't know how it could have been handled differently. No amount of recounting would change the fact that it's "too close to call".

Suppose I could prove with absolute certainty that the vote tallies were precisely equal and we decided to flip a coin. The same number of voters would be represented no matter who won, yes? Would it make any sense to flip three times, a hundred or a thousand? No.

You can't have an election end in a tie because it's "too close to call." Come January 20th, you HAVE to make a call. Period.

All you can do is try to narrow down the margin of error until a victor emerges. The recounts did this and the SCOTUS affirmed it.

 

[Jocko]

Florida is overpopulated.

And overrated.

If not for the constant influx of new northern blood, this state would just be another Arkansas.