2 Million ballots - thrown out.

November 28, 2000 6:29 AM

2 Million ballots - thrown out. Bush's behind this.
posted by tiaka (8 comments total)

What's with the ip in the url? I hate ICANN/NSI/DNS/Whatever as much as the next guy, but posting it like that makes me feel it's a spoof site that's too cheap to shell out for an authentic-sounding domain name. IE, try this. (Just to keep thing clear, I have no problem with sites, news or other, not using DNS. I just prefer the very small bit of publisher-authentication given by a dns name in the url, if I know the publisher has a hostname...)
posted by fvw at 6:35 AM on November 28, 2000

s/hostname/valid DNS name/;
posted by fvw at 6:35 AM on November 28, 2000

Ever read "Albert and the Lion", tiaka?

It'll be interesting to see the number of spoilt/rejected ballots in Canada, anyway.
posted by holgate at 6:45 AM on November 28, 2000

2 million is about 2 percent, which sounds right. But the vast majority of those spoiled ballots are from punch-card jurisdictions. Punch cards have error rates that run from 3% to 9% in normal circumstances, add in a butterfly or two-page ballot and you get up to 12%.

Jeez, an average 6% rate spread over the roughly 40 million voters in punch-card areas is already 2 million just by itself.

As I've noted on Lake Effect, the fact that punch-cards are used mainly in urban areas means that overall they skew Democratic. With such an enormous error rate, given a 10 point spread, the loss to the Democrats could be as much as a full percentage point nationally. As we've just seen, this can mean a loss in close elections.

One reason Florida was called so early was that VNS exit polls showed a multi-point lead for Gore. What if the exit polls turned out to be more right than the ballots?
posted by dhartung at 10:11 AM on November 28, 2000

Bush certainly has great telepathic powers to cause voter error all through the nation... he should be President based on this ability alone! Imagine what he could control worldwide!!
posted by chiXy at 10:46 AM on November 28, 2000

How about this proposal: you assign a certain number of electoral college votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide? After all, that's what's done statewide in Maine and Nebraska. It'd be an acknowledgement that the country is more than the sum of its parts, and that the President's role isn't simply to reflect the will of the states, but that of the nation.

After all, the reason why the rest of the world cares about the US election is that the decision perhaps has a greater impact upon them than within the US itself: the federal system, combined with the division of powers, creates a situation which almost guarantees political stalemate on a domestic level. (Indeed, the Kausfiles on Slate described the intention to vote for deadlock.)


posted by holgate at 11:04 AM on November 28, 2000

holgate: "How about this proposal: you assign a certain number of electoral college votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide?"

This isn't a national election. It is essentially 50 state elections. There are very good reasons for that which have been repeated over and over the past few weeks.
posted by jbelshaw at 1:35 PM on November 28, 2000

jbelshaw: I know the arguments, and I think they're after-the-fact justification of a flawed, archaic system.
posted by holgate at 10:29 AM on November 29, 2000