SubscribeOh for crying out loud. We all know this final report was going to be as inconclusive as the preliminary reports, another "well, it all depends on what the definition of 'chad' is" wishwash that would say Bush wins under X set of counting rules and Gore wins under Y. The remaining diehard partisans would latch onto one of the Y scenarios and do their usual shriek job, all the conservatives would laugh again, and it would be published on the bottom of page 5A somewhere and be immediately forgotten by 95% of the population.
And even if this study showed that Al Gore had actually won Florida by five trillion votes, Al would immediately call a press conference and pretty much demand that his remaining followers fall in line behind Bush and drop it. I don't particularly care for Al, but I don't believe he would want to do anything to fracture public support for the government given the current situation.
posted by aaron at 10:38 AM on October 12, 2001
Absolutely not. These are private companies. If they want to blow several million bucks to count a bunch of ballots and then shove the final report in a drawer, that's their business, not yours.
posted by aaron at 10:43 AM on October 12, 2001
The Consortium was stunned to discover that the recount revealed Gore won a clear victory. Even after casting aside the controversial butterfly ballots and discarding ballots that were “iffy”, Gore decisively won the recount. While the precise numbers are still unavailable, a New York Times journalist who was involved in the project told one of his former companions that Gore won by a sufficient margin to create “major trouble for the Bush presidency if this ever gets out”.
Gore’s victory was large enough that it became apparent he would win prior to the Consortium recount being fully completed. And contrary to a recent claim by the New York Times, the terrorism of September 11 was not the crucial factor that determined whether to release the results to the American people. Prior to that time, the de facto majority shareholders in the publicly traded New York Times Company reportedly intervened on the side of quashing the recount results and convinced the other participants to shelve the story. The executive claims that the most important decisions at the Times are made by the influential money center banks that exercise actual voting control of a majority of stock. These banks are extremely pro-Bush. In addition to their control of the Times, they have substantial financial clout with the Washington Post Company, Dow Jones and Company, and the Tribune Company. As a result, the banks exert tremendous influence on a majority of the Consortium.
:::sigh::: This is such a blatant intentional distortion of my multiple statements on the matter in the past that I'm not even going to try to respond.
I like hypocrisy: does anyone else like hypocrisy?
It's more than obvious that you do, judging from that post.
posted by aaron at 12:45 PM on October 12, 2001
Once again, that's not a democracy...
Oh for chrissakes, you shouldn't expect to live in a democracy if you aren't even intelligent enough to understand its basic precepts. While you may not like it, what you've described is neither applicable election law nor democracy- democratic choice includes counting all votes to the best of our ability, not surrendering our democratic decision making to the Gods of Vote Counting Machinery. Not all the votes were butterfly ballot mistakes, in fact most of the votes being examined by NORC were the infamous dimpled/n-corner chads, or those seeming overvotes such as a candidate's chad being punched out and their name written in (incorrect per the ballot instructions but an unmistakable selection when it comes to "clear intent of the voter"), or even votes that may have been perfectly executed but were nevertheless not counted by the machines due to those machines' own flaws.
The Real Issue is the Media's quashing of this story...
More to the point, that's not the topic of this thread; the topic of this thread was originally "NORC has finished its count, yet the major media that sponsored the count is censoring the results". The question is, why didn't they release the results? The media sponsored analysis was never meant to overthrow the existing administration, but to answer a big historical question, a question that still exists to this day. Are you tacitly agreeing that it is the role of the media to work in concert with government towards creating certain impressions and national moods among the American public? The notion that they aren't just supressing this count for now, but may permanently quash it- that's some scary shit, yo. Isn't that hearkening to a fascist or dictatorial control of expression, when the media acts little more than a willing lapdog of government decree- which in this case it certainly seems to be in a de facto sense. There is no likely reason not to release these results unless they contain information that could displease someone not named "Al Gore"- and the media ideally should never be in the business of upholding the status quo, of avoiding the displeasing of the government, or of acting as a public relations firm for a government they are given broad constitutional license in order to criticize.
posted by hincandenza at 1:00 AM on October 13, 2001
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yet for some reason, i'm 95% bought into the whole "bin laden did it" story
posted by danOstuporStar at 10:19 AM on October 12, 2001