--" A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president." Good article, but it doesn't touch on a factor that could have made all of this obsolete. The freaking media called Florida before the polls closed in 13 counties. Located in the panhandle, these counties polls were open one hour later. Many in those counties didn't vote in the last hour, as seen by voting attendance in the last hour. What makes it even worse, is that Bush won 12 of the 13 counties without regular voting attendance in the last hour. Had those people voted, the whole Florida ballot thing would have been obsolete. The FREAKING media almost gave this election to GORE. But no one makes any mention of this. Its sad. http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html
God please don't start this. I'm so sick and tired of this Florida vote conspiracy. Bush is in office, what are people complaining about!? I say let it go, it's been a year.
<B>NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings. </B> Yeah, this added a great deal of clarity to the result . Just FYI, two separate studies were done in the months after the election by Florida newspapers, and each one also found different results. Try as you might, you're never going to find conclusive evidence one way or the other. Just let the damn thing die. <B>The FREAKING media almost gave this election to GORE. But no one makes any mention of this. Its sad. </B> This is one of the silliest things I've heard. If people choose to give up their right to vote because they think they know the winner, that's their problem. If you're going to blame some Florida voters for not understanding the ballots, then they have to take the blame for not going to the polls too. Blaming this on the media is just stupid.
I guess the media doesn't announce voting results until all the polls are closed out of some crazy whim.
Here's the other <B>just as inaccurate</B> side, from the Drudge Report: http://www.drudgereport.com/mattv.htm <I> BIG MEDIA FLORIDA RECOUNT: GORE TOPPED BUSH IF ALL UNDER/OVER VOTES COUNTED; LEGAL STRATEGY DESTROYED CHANCES **World Exclusive** **Must Credit DRUDGE REPORT** A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election commissioned by the nation's main media outlets shows Al Gore edged ahead of George W. Bush "under all the scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide," the DRUDGE REPORT has learned. APCNNNYTWASHPOSTLATIMESNEWSDAYCHICAGOTRIB will splash in Monday editions an election review which will ignite total controversy during a time of war, publishing sources told DRUDGE on Sunday. MORE Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Gore, but Gore could have "reversed the outcome -- by the smallest of margins -- had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount," according to one interpretation of the database compiled by the monstermedia consortium. [Each media outlet will produce a news analysis based on the database product.] Under any standard that counted all disputed votes in Florida, Gore erased Bush's advantage and emerged with a tiny lead that ranged from 42 to 171 votes. Gore followed a legal strategy that would have led to his defeat even if it had not been rejected by the U.S. Supreme Court, according to one interpretation set for publication. Gore sought a recount of a small number of disputed ballots while the review indicates his only chance lay in a course he advocated publicly but did not pursue in court -- a full statewide recount of untallied votes! Gore took a 171-vote lead when the consortium tried to recreate how each county said it would handle a court-ordered statewide recount, and a 42-vote lead under what was called the "Palm Beach standard". MORE All outcomes were closer than the 537 votes of Bush's official victory, the media outlets will claim, while noting it would be impossible to interpret the survey results as definitive, with such narrow margins in all directions. </I>
<B>I guess the media doesn't announce voting results until all the polls are closed out of some crazy whim. </B> There's no doubt they influence the vote. However, it's not their fault that anyone loses or wins. That's like saying Gore lost Texas because the media had given Texas to Bush before the election, so all the Texas Gore voters decided not to vote. People from BOTH PARTIES probably didn't vote due to the gaffe, and it's their own damn fault that they decided not to bother. Blaming the media is a copout.
You're comparing Texas, a state Bush was massively ahead in pre-election polls to Florida which was basically a pick em state. Gore didn't win California because of the media. The media announcing and declaring winners prior to the closing of polls in Florida could have enough of an effect to sway an election. Especially when the counties with polls still open leaned heavily to one party. Even if the same percentage of people from both parties didn't vote in the panhandle, the effect on Bush's votes would have been significantly more than Gore's. I'm not trying to lay fault or blame but the ballot thing in Palm Beach isn't the same as what the media did because after all the Democrats were in charge of making the ballots in that county. Maybe in the end everything balanced out in some weird way.
If there are that many folks out there who can't vote until they see a news report in the closing hours of election day, the media is the least of our problems...
bush still won ?? hmm, looks like maybe if the ballots were counted fairly , the outcome would be different..... http://www.gopbi.com/partners/pbpost/news/gore_wins6of9.html
A. Who gives a flying ****? It's been over for nearly a year, Bush has been in office and has been doing a respectable job since the bombings. B. My guess is that if people were watching the poll results less than an hour before their polls closed, they weren't going to vote anyway. And if they decided that they shouldn't vote on various races like Senate or other local races, then **** 'em.
I thought the Orlando Sentinel story was interesting: http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news...ts12111201nov12.story?coll=orl-home-headlines Who knew that voting was so subjective? Who knew that the same group of votes could produce such different results? It's supposed to be one-person/one-vote, but because of all this red tape that we've added to carry that ideal out, it becomes a huge mess. Getting rid of the punch cards is a good step (as the punch cards themselves caused several problems), but even the OCR system isn't perfect, either (though I understand it is far less susceptible to error). Hopefully what comes out of this past election is a continual striving to make whatever voting system we use better and less and less susceptible to error. And it is funny to see how both sides' political strategy was wrong in the aftermath of the election. It's funny to see that if either side had gotten their way vis-a-vis an actual recount, that would've ended in the defeat of the candidate who got what he wanted.
I was reading the Chicago Tribune article and it said: It probably is impossible to design a study that would determine who should have won the Florida balloting. That is particularly true given the degree to which the Florida election was tainted: Thousands of felons voted, people not registered were allowed to vote, others voted twice and even the dead made it to the polls voted in small numbers. Other voters were erroneously turned away from the polls. When they were counting the ballots for this study, were they not eliminating the ballots cast by the felons, unregistered voters, duplicate voters and the dead? Seems to me that the whole $900,000 study was a huge waste of time (well, I kind of think that anyway) if they didn't take out the votes that wouldn't have been counted under any circumstances (though for people who voted twice, which vote do you count if they didn't vote for the same person on both ballots). How can anyone draw conclusions of the data (not that they should anyway) without having made allowances for those ballots? Truly a fascinating story even if it doesn't make any difference at all.
I second that I thought he would have gotten the 5% he needed to have his campain funds matched if it was not for the media making such a big deal out of those two other candidates, who were they Bore and bush, i forget.
Bush won 12 of the 13 counties with polls still open. Its probable that bush would have picked up alot of votes. Why bother if the result are in? The point is the media has been covering this for how many years. Did the central time zone just crop up in 2000? Was it magicaly created prior to the election. Maybe the new time zone was so new that people forgot about it. What time zone have I been keeping time in? .....and pluto is not the correct answer.....
<B>When they were counting the ballots for this study, were they not eliminating the ballots cast by the felons, unregistered voters, duplicate voters and the dead? </B> Do they know who the felons and such voted for? If they voted in the general election, their names wouldn't be attached to the ballots -- it would be impossible to know who they voted for.
<B>Bush won 12 of the 13 counties with polls still open. Its probable that bush would have picked up alot of votes. </B> Depends. Lots of people like to vote for winners, so its just as possible that undecided/leaning-Gore voters voted Bush knowing he was going to win anyway. The reason I mentioned Texas earlier is that its the extreme example. I wonder, if there was no polling, what the outcome would be (Bush would win either way, but I wonder if it would be closer or even more of a blowout). Do more of the loser's-voters not vote because they see it's pointless? Do more of the winner's-voters not bother since they know their candidate will win? Do people change their mind just to "vote with the flow"?
