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
Florida recount abandoned by major news organizations in the wake of terrorist attacks. I know it's all academic now, but wouldn't this fall under "letting them win"? And did any other news org. report this?
posted by Ty Webb
on Oct 12, 2001 -
38 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
The Election Story Never Told On it’s face, this article is about corruption in Florida before the election. It is still basically an known story in the US, but it is very popular in Britain. Also of note is the continued record of a lazy corporate media refusing to do any sort of journalistic legwork.
posted by capt.crackpipe
on Feb 28, 2001 -
8 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
Supreme Court II: Election Boogaloo. Programs, getcher programs here! Thanks to the wonders of the Internet, you can get your grubby hands on the
Bush and
Gore briefs right now. Fascinating reading. PDF files, of course.
posted by aaron
on Dec 10, 2000 -
2 comments
The Greenwood Position. Partisan perhaps, but will Peggy Noonan's latest OpEd in the WSJ be a rallying cry for frustrated conservatives? She offers compelling arguments and solid suggestions for proactive redress. Talk amongst yourselves.
posted by netbros
on Nov 25, 2000 -
6 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
from the front page of CNN: "....Circuit Judge...has scheduled a....hearing to issue a ruling on whether Florida Secretary of State....used her best discretion in deciding...." And my question for the legal experts here: how can a judge rule on matters of discretion? I thought Marbury vs. Madison dealt with a similar situation and that courts didn't decide political matters.
posted by greyscale
on Nov 16, 2000 -
9 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
The "War on Drugs" cost Gore the election. "In a stroke of divine justice, it turns out he [Gore] might have easily won Florida had it not been for the felony disenfranchisement laws that disproportionately strip the vote from African-American men," said Sanho Tree, director of the drug policy project of the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. "Let's hope he ponders this long and hard while he waits for the recount."
posted by lagado
on Nov 13, 2000 -
18 comments
Not very clever. Florida's Secretary of State (the BBC reports her being described as "a bit of an airhead") manages to make her position look even more ridiculous. Anyone get the disturbing feeling that this may be resolved, not in the courts, but on the streets?
posted by holgate
on Nov 13, 2000 -
16 comments
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
Other countries are looking at us and giggling about our democratic process. It's rather enlightening to see what they think, provided the attitude the US newsmedia takes when other countries' elections appear "fixed", "inefficient," or "ineffective."
posted by tatochip
on Nov 10, 2000 -
6 comments
Porter Glendinning on a weblist noted: "According to
http://www.tcpalm.com/_special/pres_returns.shtml, David McReynolds, the Socialist candidate who had the hole beneath Gore's on the ballot, got no more than 36 votes in any county in Florida except Palm Beach, where he got 302. Seems questionable to me." So we've definitely got a problem with the ballot. Is it do over time yet?
posted by mathowie
on Nov 9, 2000 -
26 comments
Linear regression analysis adds approximately 2700 votes to Gore's tally -- "If Palm Beach county were like the other counties, according to estimates with Bush's votes Buchanan would have gotten around 600 votes in that county instead of 3407 votes he actually got. If we used Gore's votes to predict Buchanan's vote, we would have predicted Buchanan to get somewhere around 792 votes. ...[in any case] it can be claimed with a high degree of statistical confidence that the mistakes cost Gore somewhere between 2000 and 3000 votes. If Bush wins Florida by an amount smaller than this, such as 1700 votes, a strong claim can be made that the confusion over the unique ballot structure in Palm Beach cost Gore the presidency...."
posted by johnb
on Nov 9, 2000 -
25 comments
