CDR: Florida reject stats, chad vs. optical
Dubya has announced he will nominate Harris as ambassador to Chad. ---- [snipped] http://foxnews.com/election_night/111600/uncounted.sml # # TALLAHASSEE, Fla. - Not every vote counts. # # George W. Bush and Al Gore are just 300 votes apart in Florida's # presidential election, but more than 180,000 Floridians who went # to the polls on Nov. 7 could have just stayed home. Their ballots # were tossed out because they chose more than one presidential # candidate, didn't choose one at all or their vote didn't register. # # That's nearly 3 percent of the 6,138,567 ballots that Florida # citizens turned in. Experts say the national average usually # runs at less than 2 percent, depending on the type of voting # method used. # # The problem in Florida largely can be traced to paper punchcard # ballots, which have helped derail the presidential election and # added "chad" to the national lexicon. # # Some counties had startlingly large numbers of ballots that # weren't counted. All three of these used punchcards: # # - In Miami-Dade County, 28,601 ballots were not counted in the # presidential race, out of about 654,044 cast. # # - In Palm Beach County, home of the controversial "butterfly # ballot," 29,702 votes weren't counted out of 462,888 total. # # - In Jacksonville and surrounding Duval County, 26,909 votes # went uncounted out of 291,545 cast. # # Election lawyer Kenneth Gross, who worked for Bob Dole's 1996 # presidential campaign, said the problem is that holes on the # cards aren't always clean. # # "If there's any paper hanging, the machine tends to push it back # into the hole and then records it as a no vote," Gross said. # # Leon County, where the state capital, Tallahassee, is located, # was another story altogether. There were only 181 votes that # weren't counted, just 0.2 percent of the total. # # That's largely because Leon and 14 other Florida counties use # an optical scan system in which voters fill in a bubble with # a pen instead of punching a hole in a card.
At 05:45 AM 11/17/00 -0500, George@orwellian.org wrote:
Dubya has announced he will nominate Harris as ambassador to Chad.
That'd be pretty Mali-cious. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
George@orwellian.org posted: [...snip...]
http://foxnews.com/election_night/111600/uncounted.sml [...snip...] # # Some counties had startlingly large numbers of ballots that # weren't counted. All three of these used punchcards: # # - In Miami-Dade County, 28,601 ballots were not counted in the # presidential race, out of about 654,044 cast. # # - In Palm Beach County, home of the controversial "butterfly # ballot," 29,702 votes weren't counted out of 462,888 total. # # - In Jacksonville and surrounding Duval County, 26,909 votes # went uncounted out of 291,545 cast. [...snip...]
At last someone mentioned the numbers! I make that about 4.4% uncounted in Dade (top of the normal range I guess), 6.4% in Palm Beach (bad) and 9.2% in Duval (pathetic). The voters of those counties have every right to complain. Whether or not that should effect the outcome of your nationwide election is, I suppose, up to your constitution. (Of which my own limited I-am-neither-a-lawyer-nor-an-American understanding agrees with the entity posting as "Jonathan"'s: jonathan@screaming.org wrote:
d) As with (c) above, the US popular vote is statistically a draw--but we have a mechanism to deal with this event: it's called the Electoral College. As defined in its duties by the Constitution, the delegates are to meet on Dec 18th IIRC, and there is no provision for them showing up late. In fact, IIRC, he who gets the majority of them present wins, and "them" need not be all there could be--just all of them there that day.
e) As with (c) and (d) above, if Florida can't get their Poop in a Pile by Dec. 18th, then they don't get to play. Tough shit. (And IMHO, it serves them right; they've had a demonstrably fucked process for at least two terms, and haven't fixed it. Maybe this will give the People of Florida the impetus to get with the ballgame the next time around.)
participants (3)
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Bill Stewart
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Georgeï¼ Orwellian.Org
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Ken Brown