I said rational. There were many irrational (and court-sanctioned) ways to count the votes, and the mainstream press flogged all of them, to dilute the (to them) horrifying main point.
>I'll go into the boring details below just in case there is anyone nerdy
>enough to care. But for everyone else, I think the important argument
>is this. Even if you accept all the Democratic party arguments about the
>count, you would still be talking about a Gore victory by a couple of
>hundred votes. That's less than *1/400th of a one percent* of the total
>votes cast. There is no way anyone would ever take the word of an
>unofficial tally on a margin like that on an issue of such importance.
>And to make things worse, 25% of the vote -- 1.8 million votes -- were never
>actually recounted. The counties just resubmitted their original tallies.
>If 1/100th of one percent of those votes changed sides, it would wipe this
>out.
It was my understanding that it was only the questionable ballots that were recounted by the media consortium.
>So proof this is not. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise no matter how
>much they jump up and down.
>
>What reading these Parry articles convinces me of is my original point:
>that the big story is is not the recount, but the vote-rigging that
>preceded the count. The tiny number of votes involved in undervotes and
>overvotes is completely swamped by-- the *thousands* of black voters who
were >wrongly *and clearly intentionally* stricken from the roles;
>-- the *10 to 15 thousand* votes invalidated due to confusing ballots used
>in heavily democratic districts. On this point I was surprised not only
>by the size but by the unanimity among all the newspapers: Gore lost over
>10,000 votes this way.
>
>Those votes swamp the margin and make all the piddly vote counting details
>irrelevant. And these are the real issues. This vote was rigged and
>people were robbed of their right to vote. That's the outrage. And the
>racial angle should be played to the hilt.
Only as much as _they_ do : ) You know my view, this was an attempt to bring back jim crow elections. Testing ground: one large southern state with the most cooperative of governors.
>IMHO, paying attention to the recount is a complete distraction.
I agree. I was/am surprised you were/are focusing on it. But here we go.
>In the
>recount, both sides were partisan, one more effectively than the other,
>and no matter how you cut it, the final result is beneath any conceivable
>margin of human or machine error. Concentrating on this fires up
>partisans on both sides, but it wins over no one in the middle and leads
>to no calls for new laws. Those should be our two goals. And
>concentrating on what I've called the real issues would do more towards
>both.
Yeah, well the real issue now is these fucking electronic voting machines with no paper record. California's Sec'y of State apparently requiring a voter-verifiable paper ballot printout from all electronic machines by, uh, well, 2006:
<http://www.wired.com/news/evote/0,2645,61334,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_1>
E-Votes Must Leave a Paper Trail
By Kim Zetter
03:25 PM Nov. 21, 2003 PT
SAN FRANCISCO -- California will become the first state
requiring all electronic voting machines produce a
voter-verifiable paper receipt.
The requirement, announced Friday by California
Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, applies to all
electronic voting systems already in use as well as
those currently being purchased. The machines must be
retrofitted with printers to produce a receipt by 2006.
With a receipt, voters will be able to verify that their
ballots have been properly cast. However, they will not
be allowed to keep the receipts, which will be stored at
voting precincts and used for a recount if any voting
irregularities arise. [Paper receipts given to the voter which list the voter's preference encourage vote-buying schemes and can destroy the principle of a secret ballot, as in, your employer tells you to bring your receipt to work the next day or don't come in--JB]
Beginning July 1, 2005, counties will not be able to
purchase any machine that does not produce a paper
trail. As of July 2006, all machines, no matter when
they were purchased, must offer a voter-verifiable paper
audit trail. This means machines currently in use by
four counties in the state will have to be fitted with
new printers to meet the requirement.
Alexander said California will be the first state to
require a voter paper trail for existing computerized
voting machines.
"There are a handful of states that have passed statutes
or certification rules that prohibit the acquisition of
paperless computerized voting machines in the future,"
she said. "But no state that already has computerized
voting machines has implemented a paper audit trail
requirement."
According to the California Voter Foundation, 21 percent
of the ballots cast nationwide in 2002 were on paperless
electronic voting machines. That's double the amount in
2000. California currently has four counties using
paperless electronic voting machines. That number is
expected to increase to 10 in time for the March
primary. .... <snip>
Back to Michael:
>IMHO, Unprecedented is a great example of this problem. It does fabulous
>work on the exclusions in the first half of the film, and then dissipates
>its force by concentrating on the final count and the court battles in
>the second. It's got some great footage of republican operatives in the mobs
>that it didn't want to throw out, and it's got some great stuff about how
>corrupt the Supreme Court is. But IMHO, all that ended up vitiating the
>real argument about what really won Bush the election. It wasn't SCOTUS
>or the mobs. It was the vote-riggers who preceded them.
Of course. We agree on this. I haven't spent much of my time thinking or worrying about it--as you can probably tell. I think the message of the film is quite unified--it's about what this particular set of powerful people did to 'win' that election--pretty much whatever it took, with complete contempt for the will of people or the rights of voters or the rule of law. Each piece of the story, whether it turned out to be a deciding factor or not, fits into this overall portrait. I'm sure they could've done better, been clearer, so on, but that's how they approached it and I don't think it was a bad approach.
>================
>Okay, now for the boring nerdy details.
>
>It is clear from the Parry articles you link to that what the film *meant*
>to say when it said "Only when the undervotes are counted would Bush have
>won" is "Only when the undervotes were counted *and the overvotes
>excluded* would Bush have won." However it leaves out why all the
>newspapers counted that way (and ran their headlines accordingly): because
>that's what the Florida Supreme Court said they should count, undervotes
>but not overvotes. So the papers assumed that, if the US Supreme Court
>hadn't intervened, and the statewide recount had gone ahead under the
>rules laid down by the Florida Supreme Court, that's what would have been
>counted. And Bush would have won. That's a perfectly reasonable
>position.
Well, it's reasonable but not justifiable. If you have an 'overvote' where the voter voted for Gore and wrote in Gore, for example, in what sense is that voter's preference unclear? My friend who works for one of the papers, and his co-reporters on the project, were appalled when they saw the spin, and they fought like hell to make sure some of what they'd actually found out got in there.
>Parry has two objections to this
><http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/120601a.html> (The film ignores it
>entirely. The reason for the incoherence of the cited concluding sentence
>is now clear. It didn't want to allow in any vitiating details, so it
>was forced to keep out details that were necessary to even understand what
>finally happened.)
>
>Parry's first objection is that, as the two experts say in the film,
>overvotes *had* to be counted under the standard then in force under
>Florida law for handcounts, which is that any vote must be counted where
>the intent of the voter is clear. There's only one problem with that:
>the Florida Supreme Court clearly took a different view, and their view
>controls. Amateur legal second guessing is a weak reed to base your
>outrage on. Certainty this is not.
Yeah, but I'm not into legal second-guessing. I'm into looking--for the purposes of this argument, which is only 1/20th of the Florida election issue as far as I'm concerned--at who got more votes. So if the Fla. SC violated the spirit and letter of the law—a very reasonable one which says that a vote must be counted if the intent of the voter is clear—I'm against that, too. What's weak about that?
>Parry's second objection is that there is evidence that the judge in
>charge of the recount was leaning toward changing his mind and eventually
>allowing overvotes to be counted.
>
>Without going into the details, there is no way you can construe that
>argument other than to say that, if the state wide recount had continued,
>the overvotes *might* have been counted. So Gore *might* have won. There
>is no way you can say it would be certain -- either that the judge would
>have changed his mind, or that his change in view would have been allowed
>to prevail. One can say shoulda, coulda, maybe even probably -- but not
>"it is certain."
There's just one eensy problem with this, and that is under a rational system of judging the intent of the voter, as far as we can tell, in the absence of a statewide recount, with the information at our disposal, Gore did get more votes--though as I've noted twice, not by much. Whether this or that legal maneuver would've worked or wouldn't have is really beside the point. You're being dragged into their game, which is to guess what would've happened if X or Y had been the legal decision. A random person on the street can give you an answer with more justice in it than all these judges put together.
I completely agree with your overall point about our emphasis, but I'm not willing to concede on the whole 'Bush won the vote' thing. It's just not necessary.
Jenny Brown