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PatiencePatiencePosted Sep 1, 2004 15:40 UTC (Wed) by vmole (subscriber, #111)In reply to: Patience by tymiles Parent article: Back door in Diebold voting systems?
Bush won the White House by capturing 271 electoral votes, one more than the Constitution requires. No, Bush won the White House by capturing 5 U.S. Supreme Court votes, exactly as many as the Constitution requires. We don't know how many electoral votes he won, because we don't know how many popular votes he won, because the SC told everybody they had to stop counting. (If I'd meant that to be funny, I'd have put in a smiley.)
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Patience Posted Sep 1, 2004 15:53 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link] Actually the problem is that very few of the political voting systems in place deal with statistical error. Too many states were within the statistical error of voting methods. While Florida was in the end (by a total recount) for Gore by a little.. New Mexico and a couple of other Gore states were during academic recounts in the Bush camp. And it took at least a year to figure it out because each state does it slightly different and some even let counties/parishes decide.
The problem is that the system is not meant to deal with elections within statistical error. You can try to lower the statistical error with newer methods.. but in the end, it is a flaw in the system itself.
Patience Posted Sep 9, 2004 14:33 UTC (Thu) by forthy (guest, #1525) [Link] Why the heck does it take a year to manually recount all votes in God'sown Country(tm)? Here in Germany, all votes are counted manually, and recounting is mandatory. Last time, our two big parties were "too close to call" in the first count (some votes got lost in the hurried accumulation at 4am), but the recount fixed that. The recount usually is available 2 weeks after the election. That's all mandatory by law, so there is no silly dispute over it. Nationwide elections here are usually quite close, and this seems to be the same anywhere - two-party systems establish even without winner takes it all (the other parties are struggling at a low level), and the two sides take about 50% of the population. The positions of the two big parties are so close to each other that the voter has no real choice. Or at least thinks he has no real choice, since the position of a party before election is not what they do afterwards. Unfortunately, what they do afterwards depends mostly on lobbyists, and the lobbyists are the same in any case.
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