h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well I pay, and I have no choice in the matter, the BBC £113 per year and I would like a little less Yank Bashing and a bit more investigative journalism.

Is this in referance to a specific report more general, or is it in some manor connected to this thread ?

I too pay a license fee, even though I have not yet watched a single BBC production this year, and I'm unlikely to. I decided to give up TV, and so far I miss it not at all (I do admit I have watched two sports events on TV this year, neither on BBC though, and both more to spend time with a friend who was watching them...).
Anyway enough whinning about TV licencing... as with any public service it has to appeal to a lot of people that it fails in some cases is to be expected, but not important.

Math

YES
I refer all interested parties to transfer to the Debating Society compartment of this site forthwith and continue thereon. I beg then to withdraw comment on this leaf.

"Constitutionally, certainly. I don't know how familiar you all are with the US Constitution, but there is no rule that the public has to vote at all. State legislatures get to pick electors however they want."

Yes, almost. The florida legislature, if you remember, was in the process of deciding to declare the election void and return a Bush slate - in case the courts came out favouring Gore. Their argument was that they could do this - there didn't have to be an election. However this argument is insufficient. The florida legislature did not have the right to decide 3 weeks after the vote, that there should be a vote and the state would support Bush. The day of the decision (usually by voting) is specified in the US constitution.


On the question of legality - the result was legal because the courts said it was, and not for any other reasons.

The contention that hand-recounts are less reliable than machine counts is false, and was denied by the republican supplier of the counting machines. Hand counting is normal and necessary if the result is so close that it is in doubt - within the margin of error of the machines.

The butterfly ballot was a mistake by election officials, and not grounds for contesting the election at all. Because it was the weakest part of the case it got the most publicity. Similarly the mere use of better machines in some parts of the state than others is not grounds for contesting the result, as it could have been contested in advance of the election.

The removal of a large number of mainly democrat voters from the electoral roll by republican officials, on the grounds that they had similar names to convicted felons, is the most serious fraud, and is quite sufficient to account for Bush's small majority and more.

While I have a few minutes, here's what I think about all this:

My personal feeling is that the election was fair. Due to a quirk of the electoral system, Bush won despite not winning the popular vote. The last time that happened was 115 years ago, but anyone who's taken a government course in high school had it drilled into them that this was a possibility. I know I did back in 1995.

Secondly, they counted all the ballots in a more detailed manner in spring 2001 long after everything had settled down. The press in the USA would have loved it if Gore had actually won Florida after the fact because of the news stories that would have come up. But Bush did win, if only just barely. At the time, it was assumed he'd won by a few thousand and it turned out to be more like 700 when everything was settled.

Despite the rants of Michael Moore, et al, Bush did win, and it wasn't "stolen." However, to win the popular vote but lose the election, while obeying the Constitution, just sucks in my mind. Even if it came out the way the votes says it should have.

As for the election next year... well, I think people will have a better idea of where that'll be headed by spring next year.

Do you have a reference for the recount results?

http://www.cnn.com/2001/ALLPOLITICS/04/04/florida.recount.01/

Jowot: "The removal of a large number of mainly democrat voters from the electoral roll by republican officials, on the grounds that they had similar names to convicted felons, is the most serious fraud, and is quite sufficient to account for Bush's small majority and more."

Do you have a reference for this?

Well for example

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=122&row=1

Thanks Eagle. That article, if you read past the beginning says:

"The newspapers' review also discovered that canvassing boards in Palm Beach and Broward counties threw out hundreds of ballots that had marks that were no different from ballots deemed to be valid.

The papers concluded that Gore would be in the White House today if those ballots had been counted. "


So its hardly definitive. It looks like the arguments are unresolved over the counting standard, and, according to this article the choice of standard has a crucial impact on who should have won the election.

It would be good to see the report on which this article was based.

Thanks for the link, Jowot.

I think there's something about the felon purge that is misleading, however. Prior to election day, nobody knew (or could have known) that Florida was going to be so critical to the outcome of the election. The voter purge took place, according to your source, between May 99 and election day.

While it is clear there was some clear screw-up in the implementation of the purge list, it's hard to say conclusively that it was deliberate, and if so, what its purpose was. If, for example, the group that investigated it went a step further and found a trend in the registered parties for those who were 'accidentally' purged, it would be telling.

As is, the argument for sloppiness is as strong as that for deliberate voting fraud.

Well I think the claim is that those wrongly purged from the database were mostly African Americans who mostly vote Democrat. If that is the case - if Republican officials wrongly remove large numbers of Democrat voters from the register, and then claim it was a cock-up - I would not be inclined to take a charitable view.

African-Americans who were legitimate felons requiring purging from the voter rolls would have been over-represented, because African-Americans are over-represented in our jail population. That may be why they were more likely to be misidentified and accidentally purged... though a name like "Willie Dickson" or "David Butler" can just as easily been a white man as a black man.

Looking at the purge list it does appear the company had race data available to them, and that at least once on that list a black voter was scrubbed for a match with a white felon, but you also find one instance of the reverse happening.

Once again, further investigation would be necessary to see what trends are found in this area. As it stands, it is inconclusive.

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/redcomedy/message/173

Something to read on the election and new voting machines.

http://www.eff.org/Activism/E-voting/20030723_eff_pr.php

E-voting reports and problems

One for the UK on e-voting problems. While historically we have lower tech elections and therefore fewer technology problems, the technology we are experimenting with now is much more seriously flawed than typical US technology. In particular remote e-voting is just not good enough.

Please endorse the resolution:

http://www.free-project.org/resolution/