Florida is the New Florida Although many discussions of voting anomalies focused on Ohio, a statistical
analysis of
Florida voting patterns performed by sociologists at
University of California, Berkeley suggests that
electronic touch screen voting in Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade may have credited George Bush with up to 260,000 extra votes in Florida. The discrepancy is not enough to change who won Florida, but it could have narrowed Bush's lead to 90,000 votes instead of 350,000, highlighting the need for better auditing of elections with electronic voting.
posted by jonp72
on Nov 18, 2004 -
33 comments
I'm amazed. (And no, this isn't a Lone Star thread.) For all the politics fuss we've engaged in over the last 2 years, I'm a bit surprised that no one thought it a fit topic for discussion that
Florida lost 100,000 votes this week. In Broward County. But of course, those are the *only* votes we lost track of, right...?
posted by baylink
on Nov 8, 2002 -
5 comments
Florida Machine Records Votes for Wrong Candidate. OK, I know Matt Drudge isn't exactly a venerated news outlet, but he
is in South Florida. And he's reporting that a West Palm Beach voter called in to a South Florida radio talk show to report that when he voted for McBride this morning the machine counted his vote for Bush. After he'd tried three times, the voter said, an observing poll worker finally acknowledged that the machine would have to be reprogrammed, since earlier voters had experienced the same problem. There is no official confirmation of this problem, but calls to the same radio show two years ago evidently foreshadowed the 2000 election debacle. I'll be keeping an eye on sites like Josh Marshall's
Talking Points Memo as the day wears on. In the end, what should the electorate do (in addition to initiating lawsuits) if outcome-determining irregularities surface in yet another Florida election?
posted by maud
on Nov 5, 2002 -
68 comments
Jeb Bush delivers Florida ... to Janet Reno's opponent in the primary. Not a repost of the
trouble-at-the-polls brouhaha. Carl Hiaasen looks at the Bush team's "stupendous" backfire in targeting a second-tier candidate, eventual winner Bill McBride, in an apparently incessant string of TV ads that moved McBride from anonymity to a fearsome candidate. "Why else would the GOP buy so much TV time to slam him?" asks Hiaasen, and indeed, McBride's follow-up ads capitalized on this notoriety. By carrying the primary, the race against Bush gets more interesting: "Reno is a known quantity about whom most voters already feel strongly one way or the other," notes Hiaasen. "McBride is a fresh face with no Clinton baggage and a Bronze Star from the Vietnam War."
posted by blueshammer
on Sep 12, 2002 -
11 comments
Canine candidate challenges Harris in FL elections Harris the dog is running as a write-in candidate in the Republican primary. Percy is described as "a compassionate conservative who takes a hard-line with social parasites, particularly fleas and worms. His past is free of sex scandals, due to 'timely neutering.'" A great reminder of why this country is so great.
posted by wackybrit
on Jul 3, 2002 -
25 comments
Election 2000 Enchantment: A love, crime story... From the author's
geocities site: "Election 2000 Enchantment," by Elaine North, is a fun-filled adventure of two young women, who are ballot hand recounters during the Florida election crisis. The young women encounter intrigue, romance, passion, crime, danger and deception as they meet some of the many people from across the country that converge upon Florida due to the derailed presidential election. Exploitation or creativity? You decide.
posted by krewson
on Jun 11, 2002 -
6 comments
Reno's going to run...and
Gramm is going to retire. Two
Hispanic Congressmen, a Republican and a Democrat, seem poised to run for the Senate seat. (Does a Democrat even stand a chance in Texas...with little more than a year 'til the election?)
That makes 3 Republican Senate retirements (Thurmond, Helms, Gramm). 20 Republican Senate seats are up for reelection as opposed to 13 Democrat seats. How do you think the Democrats will fare in the 2002 elections -- both in and out of the Senate?
posted by jennak
on Sep 4, 2001 -
13 comments
NYTimes: "How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote" "Their goal was simple: to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in counties won by Mr. Bush, particularly those with a high concentration of military voters, while seeking to disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Vice President Al Gore.
A six-month investigation by The New York Times of this chapter in the closest presidential election in American history shows that the Republican effort had a decided impact. Under intense pressure from the Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws. "
posted by owillis
on Jul 14, 2001 -
71 comments
It's simple: Don't let the blacks vote, your guy "wins". "Florida's conduct of the 2000 presidential election was marked by "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" that unfairly penalized minority voters, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has concluded in a report that criticizes top state officials -- particularly Gov. Jeb Bush and Secretary of State Katherine Harris -- for allowing disparate treatment of voters."
"A computer analysis by The Post showed that the more black and Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of invalidated votes."
"No inquiry so far has been as broad as that conducted by the commission -- or as specifically focused on the rights of minorities. The commission held three days of hearings, interviewed 100 witnesses and reviewed 118,000 documents."
posted by owillis
on Jun 5, 2001 -
40 comments
Hanging a dead chad . . . The Miami Herald has completed the recount of undervotes from all 67 counties in Florida. The findings? The Herald says it best:
. . . under almost all scenarios, Bush still would have won. Indeed, in one of the great ironies of the bitter 2000 election, Bush's lead would have vanished only if the recount had been conducted under severely restrictive standards advocated by some Republicans. Go figure.
posted by iceberg273
on Apr 4, 2001 -
28 comments
Clinton: "They thought the election was over, the Republicans did. By the time it was over, our candidate had won the popular vote, and the only way they could win the election was to stop the voting in Florida".
Give 'em hell Bill!
posted by owillis
on Jan 9, 2001 -
16 comments
The latest iteration of the Great Chad Count of 2001 has been announced. Some news organizations finally announce specifics about their planned gang-recount. They'll pay a nonprofit firm to "inventory" the votes, but each news organization will decide separately what the results mean. And one paper is holding an entirely separate count of its own. Inside.com summarizes: "When the laborious process is completed in 8 to 10 weeks, look for an orgy of tea-leaf discernment as any news organization willing to share in the costs will be free to spin and analyze the results in any way they please."
posted by aaron
on Jan 9, 2001 -
2 comments
Fuckwits. And we were arguing about unclear ballot papers and the inability to follow written instructions? The Palm Beach canvassing board sends its counters home for Thanksgiving, comes back on Friday to find an extra few thousand votes to go through, and can't get its numbers in on time, so Ms Harris disregards them. Really, the people in charge need horse-whipping.
posted by holgate
on Nov 26, 2000 -
1 comment
"Blame Florida! Blame Florida! ...with its stooges and its chad, the whole election's just gone mad..."
(Yeah, it's Salon: but Talbot has a point. Had this been outside the US, with Jimmy Carter and the other observers, the last few days' lunacy would have left no-one in any doubt that the state couldn't organise a pissup in a brewery.)
posted by holgate
on Nov 24, 2000 -
10 comments
More Fun With the Electoral College! What's most disturbing isn't that it may be weeks or months before we actually know who won the election. I mean who cares? Neither of these guys represent
you. They both suck. The disturbing part is that it is actually possible the voices of hundreds of thousands of Florida voters
might not be heard at all!
posted by ZachsMind
on Nov 16, 2000 -
14 comments
The end... finally. Today at five pm. Judge Lewis upholds the statutory deadline for election returns to be certified, despite media specualtion that he was initially inclined to extend it.
posted by mikewas
on Nov 14, 2000 -
35 comments
What It Will Take to Get Elected ... in 1988. Interesting historical piece basically looking at the chances of a Democratic victory in 1988. Makes for good reading -- now that we've all become political junkies -- while waiting for news from Florida.
posted by leo
on Nov 12, 2000 -
1 comment
NY Times report on voting problems in Palm Beach "...some precinct workers said that they were under strict instructions to turn away people asking for voting assistance — mainly out of fear that it would slow down the voting. Louise Austin, a precinct worker in Boynton Beach, said she and other workers at her precinct turned away voters who besieged them with questions.
"People were coming up to me," Ms. Austin said,
"and I had to follow the directive — `Don't help anyone. Don't talk to anyone.' "
posted by aurelian
on Nov 11, 2000 -
1 comment
Oops, Florida sent it again. As if Florida elections couldn't get worse, Salon.com is reporting that some absentees received duplicate ballots.
Poor Florida. I highly doubt election problems are only happening in this state, it's just being put under the microscope. Every little problem is huge now.
Salon is doing a great job with interesting stories, too.
Check'em out.
posted by gramcracker
on Nov 9, 2000 -
0 comments
Official Florida Law on Paper Ballots. I've been
reading from the pundits that the Florida ballot may be illegal because it "specifies that voters mark an X in the blank space to the right of the name of the candidate they want to vote for." (Quote from MSNBC)
However, the Florida statue I found says "opposite such candidate's name." Has anyone heard this argument, and if the Dems are actually gonna try it?
posted by gramcracker
on Nov 9, 2000 -
15 comments
