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Hanging chadsHanging chadsPosted Aug 17, 2007 8:02 UTC (Fri) by forthy (guest, #1525)In reply to: Hanging chads by giraffedata Parent article: Securing our votes
while a full hand recount was found to be not legally required, a bunch of journalists did one anyhow and found that no matter how you counted the ambiguous votes, George Bush won No, you remember incorrectly. They found that if you only recounted the four districts Al Gore wanted to have recounted, George Bush still won. But if you recounted all Florida, George Bush would have lost. Most of this just went under, since the publication was short after 9/11, and due to the "many scenario" theme in the article, the conclusion was not obvious (it also depended on the standard of "voters intent"). See Wikipedia. Unfortunately, the Times article cited there is only available to subscribers. But it's certainly wrong that "no matter how you recounted, George Bush won". You can however say that it was too close to call, because due to the uncertainty with the recounting, you still didn't get a convincing result. If you can't get a winner, the rule "the winner takes it all" shouldn't apply, and if you can't do so, because your election process has a way too high error margin, even less so. IMHO, if this recount had been published a month before 9/11, the conclusion would have been different, and George Bush would have had a snowball's chance in hell to stay president.
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Hanging chads Posted Aug 18, 2007 18:37 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link] They found that if you only recounted the four districts Al Gore wanted to have recounted, George Bush still won. But if you recounted all Florida, George Bush would have lost. Thanks. I stand corrected. But looking at the free abstract of that article, I see it says Bush could have lost; i.e. it depends on your rules for counting ambiguous ballots. I found another source that says even in the 4-district recount, if you interpreted "overvotes" a certain way, Gore could win. (An overvote is where someone votes for two candidates; I don't know what the proposed methods for disambiguating those are). IMHO, if this recount had been published a month before 9/11, the conclusion would have been different, and George Bush would have had a snowball's chance in hell to stay president. So you think somehow Bush's presidency would end just because 50% of the people in Florida didn't vote for him? Many people, including the US Supreme Court, thought the actual count was not as important as the count defined by the rules of the game. And that it's no great travesty of democracy if there is a .05% error in the voting.
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