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

Two things:
First to Fraulein Grafenberg: I understand very well the historical significance of testing before allowing voting that was meant to keep certain parts of the population from being able to exercise their rights. I know all about the Jim Crow laws. That is why I was careful to make it clear that multiple ways of testing and educating should be allowed. This despite the fact that we have reason to expect all adults that have passed through the US school system to be capable of reading. (I also understand the limitations in that statement and am prepared to try to find ways around them.)

Second: The opposition to the recount is for multiple reasons. One, the manual recount cannot be expected to be more accurate, nor necessarily less, than the automatic one. Second, the Bush argument is that at least one of the recounts is taking place in a county where Gore easily won. A manual recount is able to read more votes than the automatic one (a larger number, equivalent error ratio). Since the percentage of Gore votes in that county was significantly higher, Gore will get a larger percentage of the previously rejected votes bringing his statewide totals toward Bush's. Bush would have been well advised to ask for his own manual recount in the counties where he had the advantage to balance out Gore's recount. But it is too late for that.

Scottworthy

I think we'll necesarily have a problem with the new President's authority. The guy in the office is the guy in the office. Both of Gore and Bush have more votes and a higher precentage than Clinton had.

Being a Bush supporter doesn't have anything to do with my feelings about the recount. I actually cast a protest vote for Browne, because I want the Republican party to be more resonable. Still, I think the democrats just want to keep counting, and changing the rules of how they count until they win. If that were to happen then I'm sure the democrats would declare that all was right with the world. What if Bush demands a recount in other states? How far do we carry this nonsense! They've counted the ballots twice already.

The ballot in Palm Beach was prepared by a democrat, and it is easy to figure out. I don't buy any of this nonsense about people being turned away at the polls as a racist plot to sway the vote.

Also, the popular vote is not necesarily accurate. Not every note in this country is counted. For instance, California didn't bother counting their absentee ballots. There's too few to make a difference in thier state election. If those are votes primarily from the military, then they're likely to go overwhelming ly for Bush.

I think we'd all be happier if we went to a national popular election for president where we have runoffs until we have a majority.

How is having runoff after runoff after runoff any different than having recount after recount? This isn't just the idea of the "little d", as you like to spell it, Democrats. Bush's team is thinking about challenging the results of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, or anywhere else he narrowly lost to Gore.

Testing potential voters can't be compared to driver's licensing, college examinations, or anything else that previous postings have listed. It is the Constitutional right of every American citizen. It is outrageous that anyone is this forum would believe otherwise. The Founding Fathers may have originally limited the franchise to land-owning white males, but thanks to successive Constitutional Amendments that right has been extended to all. The debacle in Florida isn't due to intelligence levels, but human error. Last time I checked error does not belong to the simple minded alone.

While I agree with you about the runoffs, I don't see what is so outrageous about expecting voters to educate themselves about what they're voting on. Judging without first educating one's self is called prejudice when done to people. That is clearly wrong. In what fundamental way is this any different? I'm not trying to limit voters. I want everyone to vote, but only after taking the time to learn what they're voting about. I fail to see how that hurts anyone. In fact, I believe that would be a great help to everyone in any democracy.

Scottworthy

Oh, I would never, never, never disagree with education and responsible voting. I guess I wasn't specifically referring to your remarks, Scottworthy. There were a number of others earlier in the forum that seemed to be advocating restriction of the franchise based on IQ. That attitude was what I was worried about.

If you were having a run off, then you only have one. You take the top two vote getters, and they run off. Then you add up all of the votes and that's it. I just think it's a better to show that the majority of American voters have sent someone to the White House.

I've changed my mind about recounts. I heard how they're doing it in Valapusa County, Florida. They sound like they're doing a pretty fair job of it. I think if we are going to have a recount, then their needs to be one state-wide recount, and have that be final. I don't think it would be unreasonable to have recounts in other states. Heck, New Mexico was won by 17 votes.

However, if we're going to do it, we need to do it ASAP, and we need to do it one time as a whole; up or down; win, loose or draw. And if I need to, I'll use more clichés.

Of course, this may all be moot. The Secretary of State of Florida is saying she is required to certify the election by Tuesday at 5:00PM. She's a republican Bush supporter, but the law is the law. Although, it's been waived in the past.

There is no Constitutional right to vote. The Constitution only says that there are some things for which you can not be denied the right to vote. The vote is a privilege, and the states determine who has that right.

I think it's reasonable to have some sort of requirement to extend the privilege to vote. I think I suggested earlier that a person should be able to identify the two major party candidates for the highest elective office on the ballot. Would that be too hard? Should a person be allowed to vote if they don't even know that? This standard would probably be too open to fraud though.

I think a better requirement would be to require a high school diploma or equivalency. That should demonstrate the ability to read, and some basic ideas about our history and government.

I also think you should be required to show picture ID to vote, and have absentee ballots notarized. From what I've been readin, there's been a lot of fraud in this election.

Limiting votes to those who have proved themselves worthy - no it don't work for me. My own opinion is that voteing should be compulsary, with a stiff fine for those who refuse to vote - before everybody jumps on back let me say I also belive that there should be a box on ballot papers for those who wish to abstain.

What would that accomplish. Wouldn't be easier for people to abstain by staying home? It's bad enough that we're electing presidents with a plurality or even a minority of the popular vote. Under this system, we'd have even lower percentages of voters supporting folks. I think it would further undermine the confidence we have in the system (Yes I still think that's possible, but not by much).

Incidently, you can already abstain. You don't have to punch all the holes in the ballot. We have a bunch of floks around here who run uncontested. The major positions are the District Attorney and the Judges. Ididn't vote for any of them. The only uncontested race I voted in was the County Corner. I've worked with him some, and he's a dscent fellow.

By making people vote - you are forcing them to pause and think about the issues, also if you don't vote you got no right to critasize unless ofcourse you made a decision to abstain for political reasion as opposed to lazyness.

I don't know. It reminds me of the cliche, "You can lead a man to learning, but you can't make him think." I'm not sure if that qualifies as a cliche since I don't remeber it all that well, and I probably misquoted it, but it should be a cliche!

Here's a question for you: Would it be legal? It sounds to me like you're forceing someone to do something against their will. Generally, we don't care to do that much in this country.

By forcing someone to vote you don't make them think. You make them mark a piece of paper. You end up with people who act like the students that just pick all 'C' on a multiple choice test. Also, I know it would take a constitutional amendment to make it legal, and that just won't happen.

Scottworthy

Two things, one putting the abstention option on the ballot means nobody is forced to vote for someone they don't approve of. two there are many countries where voteing is mandetary eg Australia.

The whole IQ argument has apparently fallen into a sarchasm (the gulf between the speaker and the audience member who misses the point entirely), so I will say this again only once. It was not my intent to say that IQ should be the test for voting. But a high school diploma does not seem to be an unreasonable standard. It will then place value on two things that people ignore, voting rights and the diploma. Maybe people will get an actual education. Or not. Maybe people will vote. Or not. But disenfranchising a people who willfully surrender their rights to a free education does not sound to me like a terrible idea.

And for anyone comfortable with allowing Florida to pick our president (not that it matters... it's like choosing between Bad and Awful), here's a bit of history for reflection, courtesy of The Daytona Sun News:


Ballot Messes a Florida Tradition
By Mark Lane

DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. -- It's all very flattering to know our votes count extra hard in Florida. But if I had my druthers, some other state would be the one to have the final say in this election.

It's not that we're the wrong people to dictate what's good for the rest of the county. We're qualified. It's just that when it comes to counting votes, well, we have something of a past.

The English can't cook, Italians can't form governments, Germans can't do comedy and Floridians can't hold an untainted election. It's just a cultural thing.

Only three years ago, Miami's mayoral election was so breathtakingly fraudulent -- even by South Florida standards -- that it was overturned by the courts and 56 people faced criminal charges.

Where I live, in Volusia County, the absentee ballot handling was so irregular four years ago that a court had to declare the winner in the sheriff's race more than two months afterward. To this day, speculating on the identity of "the real sheriff" is a sure-fire way to start a fight in a crowded room.

And the last time the nation looked to Florida to decide the winner in a presidential race in which the popular vote and electoral vote diverged?

Oh, don't ask. It was bad. Very bad.

In 1876 Florida only had four electoral votes, but they were the four electoral votes that mattered. With most of the nation's ballots counted, Democrat Samuel J. Tilden was ahead by a quarter one electoral vote short of victory. Republican Rutherford B. Hayes needed the electoral votes of Florida, Louisiana and South Carolina to win.

About 50,000 ballots were cast in Florida -- the exact number will never be known -- and Hayes and Tilden were less than 100 votes apart.

Historians think Tilden probably won the state. Who knows? Ballot mishandling, fraud, selective vote counting and intimidation were the rule, not the exception.

Allow me to relate a true hometown story. The town where I live voted overwhelming for Hayes. The man charged with the bringing the votes to the county seat, Loomis Day, had a pretty good idea of how local politics worked and suspected that safe delivery of Republican ballots was not to be taken for granted. (The county seat would be moved to a more convenient place a dozen years later after, yes, another disputed election.)

Day carried the ballot box by wagon but had someone else transport a fake ballot box. Sure enough, the decoy ballot box was snatched en route. New Year's Day 1877 arrived without an election winner. Pundits of the day speculated about another civil war. Rioting in the streets was expected
.
Congress received three different sets of results from Florida. The first canvassing board declared the state for Hayes, a rival board declared it for Tilden and in January 1877, a third board appointed by the new governor certified the election for Tilden.

Ultimately, Congress' Electoral Commission awarded Florida's electoral votes to Hayes. The decision was the culmination a deal that ended Reconstruction and sold out the basic rights of Southern black people for generations but prevented renewed regional conflict.

Given this rich history, you really don't want to depend on Florida elections to pick The leader of The World's Greatest Superpower. I'm not sure I would want Florida's election system to pick the MTV music awards.

Meanwhile in Volusia County there have been mysterious counting fluctuations, ballots found in the back seat of a poll-worker's car and registered voters turned away at the polls. The elections office was wrapped in yellow
crime-scene tape on election night. There were lost ballots in South Florida. And in Palm Beach they had a ballot laid out with the clarity of a VCR programming diagram.

The tradition lives.

A: Just becasue other countries do it doesn't make it either right in general or appropriate for the United States.

B: You would be compelling American citizens to do something.

How about another idea for an election. What if we had the poles open over a period of several days. Perhaps from Thursday through Saturday. Over the course of the election, citizens could see what was happening in the election and feel the importance of going to vote. It would also make it more conveinent for folks to vote .

Longer voting hours are a very good idea and have generally proved sucessful where-ever they have been tried, unfortunately the public would not know what is going on in terms of votes cast, as I belive in US as in the UK there are laws preventing the use of post ballot surveys until the polls close.

Well CNN was reporting the decisions of Florida and California before the polls were closed. If we're going to play God with the electoral system, why not make it legal to post the results at the end of each day.

Not exactly. Counties don't report returns until the polls close. However, they close three hours earlier in New York than in California, so we can know before we vote where the election for president and the weight in Congress is going. Not that it matters.

I think mandatory voting is entirely the wrong idea. Part of a free society is the freedom to do nothing at all. If you force people to cast a vote, you're taking away their god-given right to put their fat asses in a chair and watch Jerry Springer reruns while the microwave pizza warms up. What next... mandatory schooling? Mandatory work? Mandatory showering??

It's taken me a while to catch up on this.

I agree with HappyDude:
compulsory voting with an "A Plague on Both (All) Your Houses" option. That would show how much / little support there really is for the much vaunted "popular mandate" rather than allowing the possibility of claiming that the absent voters were all down with a cold or a sprained wrist and just couldn't vote. OK we know that, at present, a voter can deliberately "Spoil" a ballot - I've done it myself - but the people to whom the message is addressed can avoid reading the intent. It's just another spoiled paper. But if we could arrive at an "OPPOSITION PARTY" + a "GET STUFFED, ALL OF YOU" total versus voters in favour of the governing party or president, it would prevent inflated claims as to popular mandate, or at least give the media some point of reference with which to twit the person in charge.

On the BBC World Service (10 Nov.), there was an interview with Mr. M. S. Gill - the man who organised the election in India.
He had a staff of 5 million to administer the election involving some 600 million voters. He declined to gloat over his low tech success compared with .... but proudly referred to his British sense of humour by saying that it was a pity that there was no invitation extended to a party of independent observers, which he would have been pleased to lead.

Would this have helped at all?
In the UK each "polling station" has a "presiding officer".
Each P.O. is provided with x voting papers.
y papers are used.
z papers are left unused.
At the close of the poll (consistent throughout the country) the P.O. takes the ballot boxes and the unused forms to the Returning Officer('s deputy) but is not released from duty until the used / unused papers have been reconciled: x = y + z. (Q.E.D.) any discrepancy reported to the candidates' agents for consideration. "Postal ballots" are included at this point. At this stage there has been no attempt to apportion the votes nor sift "spoiled" papers.
Only after ALL the boxes have been accounted for are the papers scrutinised for validity and sorted by candidate. Whilst "observers" can see the size of the piles, the R.O. will not make any announcement until all valid votes, and spoiled papers totals have been revealed to the candidates' agents and accepted by them or a recount requested. If a recount shows a significantly different total then a second etc. recount may be conducted.

Just thought you might like to know that - but I've been wrong before.