Bush Was Elected - Get Over It

Politics International Politics
1

I get so tired of reading this nonsense.

Bush was successful before the Supreme Court because he had a valid due process argument.

Let’s re-visit the saga: Initially, Gore asked that the recount of Florida votes be limited to certain counties that heavily favored him. Recounting increased the vote totals for both candidates, and decreased Bush’s lead, but Bush still remained ahead after that recount. Then, Gore wanted a manual recount for the counties that favored him, on the ground that hand counting is more accurate. That, of course, is a load of shite.

Florida Secretary of State Harris petitioned the Florida Supreme Court to stop the hand counts because she feared that if countywide manual recounts continued, the results would be broadcast to the nation, which would neither advance the process nor serve the interests of public policy. There was no consistent standards for conducting the recount and thus the integrity of the ballots themselves was in danger.

Hand-counting increases the number of votes counted, because humans will accept more ballots than machines accept. The chard in the punch card may not have been completely punched out, but the human eye can see that and count it. A hand count should increase the total for both candidates, but in a way that is statistically proportional to the machine votes already cast, if the human eye is nonpartisan.

But humans are partisan (as should be evident). On election night, Bush had a 1,784 vote lead over Gore; after several recounts, that margin dropped to 300 votes. If I recall what I read then correctly, the statistical chance that Gore would increase his Florida vote total as much as he did was approximately 43 million to one. How the hell did he beat those odds? (If he’s that lucky, why didn’t he win Florida by a huge percentage of votes in the first place?)

Unfortunately, the fact is, the people who handled the ballots treated them inconsistently. Machines (unlike people counting manually) belong to no political party. It is known that the differing standards the counters used in evaluating the results changed from precinct to precinct and from hour to hour. Palm Beach’s Election Commission changed its standards twice. That kind of arbitrary, capricious, and ex post facto decision-making made for a significant due process problem. The most elemental meaning of due process is “fair procedure.”

In Pinellas County (a Gore stronghold), when humans reinserted the ballots into the machine for a recount, the very partisan election officials decided to help things along. Before resubmission, they removed the chad (the little piece of paper the voter is supposed to push through the computer ballot) by hand thus giving Gore an extra 417 votes. If they were permitted to do that when limited by the machine, think of the opportunities if they didn’t need to bother with the machine at all!

One Florida judge ruled that the election officials could treat a ballot as cast for a particular candidate even if there was no punch in the card, as long as the “dimple” in the card was such that the hand counter thought that he knew the true intention of the voter. Do you really think that such guesses would be consistently applied over thousands of ballots? Or do you think that such guesses could have been divorced from the politics of the official?

Hand counting – as it was done in Florida – violated basic procedural due process. It didn’t provide better information regarding the voters’ intent. The only thing we could know from the nonsense going on was that the recounting would only stop when the vote came out the way Gore’s supporters wanted.

The manual hand count in Florida was not counting votes, it was manufacturing votes.

That is why Bush went to the US Supreme Court… to prevent an arbitrary, standardless hand count. He claimed that the recount methods were a violation of due process, both because they were standardless and because they changed the rules after the election. The Supreme Court granted cert. on the due process claim, as well as on several statutory claims.

Bush’s Reply Brief stated that Bush sought injunctive relief not only to stop the selective and standardless recounts, but also to prohibit certification of returns that included the results procured through flawed recounts.

And the US Supreme Court ruled correctly, IMO. If you disagree, I’d like to know why… rather than hearing the same pathetic and tired complaint that “Bush wasn’t elected”. :unamused:

2

i’ll bite…yes, bush was elected by the electoral college, not the populace of the people. florida’s popular vote was pretty much a statistical dead heat, yet ALL of florida’s electoral votes went to bush. if the electoral votes represent the sentiment of the popular vote, shouldn’t florida electoral vote have been along a 13/11 split as oppossed to 24-0 allotment it was given? in the early days, electoral votes from a specific state were rarely unanimous. today it is the opposite, that went one elector deviates from the state level political party agenda it is noteworthy.

america’ll go to war to ram democracy down the throats of people on other continents, but direct election of the president still isn’t permitted. taiwan can directly elect its prez, but america can’t.

a question i have wondered about since the last election, and i would sincerely appreciate any feedback: one member of the electoral college abstained from voting. how is such legal: they are sent to represent the will of their state, how can abstaining be interpreted as anything but nullification of the popular vote of the state citizens?

thanks.

3

Well, that is an entirely different issue. However, all of our presidents have been elected by the electoral college and, for what its worth, I favor the electoral college, despite its apparent flaws. I believe that its advantages outweigh its disadvantages. Besides, I didn’t hear any of Gore’s supporters complaining about being awarded all of the electoral points from several other states which were very close in terms of the popular vote (but Bush didn’t demand recounts in those states).

How many other states have done that?

Only if doing so is deemed necessary for US security.

Read The Federalists Papers (No. 10) by James Madison. There is a very good reason that the US was established as a republic rather than as a [pure] democracy.

A pure democracy, of the type Jefferson advocated, works well only for relatively small homogenous populations living in relatively small geographic confines (like Taiwan).

:blush: That’s going to require some research… I’ll try… ain’t promising anything, though.

4

Just two words from me: butterfly ballot

5

Two words from me: Illinois…yawn

backspace.com/notes/topic/org

house.gov/kingston/pr001115_president.htm

6

In 1999, Katherine Harris, who was both G.W. Bush’s presidential campaign co-chairwoman and the Florida secretary of state in charge of elections paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida’s voter roles and remove anyone “suspected” of being a former felon. The law states that ex-felons in Florida cannot vote which means 31% of all black men in Florida cannot vote because they have a felony on their record.

Blacks in Florida (and throughout the US) are Democrats. Al Gore received more than 90% of them on Nov. 7, 2000.

Katherine Harris not only removed thousands of black felons from the list but thousands of black citizens that had never committed a crime in their life. Harris instructed Database to include names that were SIMILAR to the names of actual felons including birthdates or social security numbers. As a result, 173,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped off the record. In Florida’s largest country, Miami-Dade, 66% of the voters removed were black. In Tampa, 54% of the voters removed were black.

Another 8,000 were not allowed to vote as Database received a list from another state which claimed those individuals were former convicts. What state did this? None other than Texas, home of George W. Bush.

While the American media ignored this, it was the BBC who uncovered this story.

I am a real American citizen and would be more than happy to discuss the fraud of the 2000 elections and the squatter that is currently taking up space at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

7

hehehehehe

8

The Electoral College system was just dandy in the days when it took a week and three horses to reach a central location where votes could be tallied. In this day and age, however, I fail to see its necessity.

Surely it’s possible to muzzle the media on preliminary results of the voting if this is a concern (i.e., not having Hawaii’s votes “count” because of people voting to follow the flow of Eastern states.)

However, having a President or any other official who did NOT receive the majority of the votes of the people does not seem democratic to me. The people don’t elect the Electors, either, do they? I don’t care if it was a Democrat or a Republican who gained the White House in this way without a majority of hte popular vote – it’s not right, and much less for a nation who sends people out to monitor OTHER countries’ elections with great glee.

I haven’t renewed my registration to vote and do not plan to.

9

Tough. Felons also can’t legally own firearms.

Now, would you also like to explain to us why the Clinton/Gore gang tried to keep military personel and their families stationed overseas from receiving their ballots and then tried to disqualify those cast. I guess Bubba and Al had more in common with felons than they did with the military men and women serving them.

defenselink.mil/news/Nov2000 … 11294.html

www-hoover.stanford.edu/publicat … ck-s1.html

bailiwick.lib.uiowa.edu/politica … udge01.htm

antiwar.com/justin/j112000.html

10

Had your candidate been the one at a disadvantage, I doubt your sentiments in support of this mockery would remain. Republicans are notorious fighters for justice, afterall. Aren’t they? :? Especially if it serves them.

The only way the US will ever overturn the electoral college dinosaur in congress, would to be for a Republican to lose his ‘rightful’ popular vote to a damn liberal. Let’s hope the shoe ends up on the other foot some day soon.

Seems the South rose up again, doesn’t it?
Look away, look away, look away Dixieland.

11

Interesting. First the charge was that Bush was not elected… but that he was “selected” by the US Sup. Ct. Now that you know that charge is complete and utter nonsense, the charge turns to the failure of the electoral college.

This, I find mildly amusing. All US presidents have been elected by the electoral college, and in fact, this past election is not the first time that an US president was elected by less than a popular majority.

Face it… some of you simply hate Bush and thus are drawing at straws in an attempt to disqualify his election.

12

[quote]skeptic yank wrote:
America’ll go to war to ram democracy down the throats of people on other continents

Tigerman replied:
Only if doing so is deemed necessary for US security. [/quote]

Whatever merit T-man’s argument may have had initially was deep-sixed with that laughable comment.

13

[quote=“taiwantim70”]In 1999, Katherine Harris… paid $4 million to Database Technologies to go through Florida’s voter roles and remove anyone “suspected” of being a former felon. The law states that ex-felons in Florida cannot vote which means 31% of all black men in Florida cannot vote because they have a felony on their record.

Blacks in Florida (and throughout the US) are Democrats. Al Gore received more than 90% of them on Nov. 7, 2000.

Katherine Harris not only removed thousands of black felons from the list but thousands of black citizens that had never committed a crime in their life. Harris instructed Database to include names that were SIMILAR to the names of actual felons including birthdates or social security numbers. As a result, 173,000 registered voters in Florida were permanently wiped off the record. In Florida’s largest country, Miami-Dade, 66% of the voters removed were black. In Tampa, 54% of the voters removed were black.

I am a real American citizen and would be more than happy to discuss the fraud of the 2000 elections and the squatter that is currently taking up space at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.[/quote]

Felons should not be permitted to vote, regardless of their race, creed, sex, etc…

If non-felons were denied their right to vote, that is a separate issue.

Now, if you want to discuss fraud in the 2000 elections, let’s talk about the disgraceful acts of President Clinton and the democrats in trying to prevent US military personnel from voting.

The 26th Amendment gives all citizens the right to vote once they reach 18 years of age. When that amendment was enacted, the slogan was, “Old enough to fight; old enough to vote.”

So, tell us, why did Gore’s lawyers go out of their way to deny the right to vote to military absentees. Just prior to the election, President Clinton tried to bar voting booths at military bases!

Senator Lieberman voiced surprise that his campaign was trying to disenfranchise the military. Yet, that is exactly what was happening. Did Senator Lieberman not know what is going on? Hell, Gore argued that (1) every vote should count, (2) we should not worry about technicalities, and (3) we should seek to divine the voter’s intent.

Yet, (1) Gore didn’t want the military vote to count, (2) he used technicalities to disqualify military ballots, and (3) it was easy to figure out the intent of the absentee ballots – there was no need to count first-trimester pregnant chads.

Gore’s attorneys challenged each and every absentee military vote. Their sole intent was to disqualify each absentee voter. They constantly challenged Military Votes that were clearly legitimate but they were able to disqualify them on a technicality.

They did this in all counties in Florida… in Orange County they succeeded in getting 117 of the 137 absentee ballots cast out. They denied a number of votes postmarked Queens NY, ballots that were clearly ordered from overseas, clearly returned from overseas, and verified by the Post Office that DOD uses the Queens post office to handle overseas mail. They were denied because they didn’t indicate APO, Gore’s attorneys denied military votes postmarked out of Jacksonville, knowing full well they came from ships at sea and were flown into Jacksonville.

The Florida regulations did not require a postmark and allowed a date to prove that the ballots were mailed on time. Those regulations were part of a federal consent decree because Florida had been enforcing rules that serve to disenfranchise the military. Florida statutes stated that proof of a postmark is conclusive, but they do not appear to say that proof of a postmark is the only way to prove the date. In any event, the Florida regulations allow proof by a date rather than by postmark.

Nonetheless, some of the counties where Gore’s counters operated disqualified military votes that did not have postmarks.

Just do any Lexis or Westlaw search and you will see that some Florida counties rejected military ballots without postmarks even though Florida regulations allow such ballots to be counted.

Moreover, in Seminole County, both the Democrats and the Republicans sent out applications to persons likely to be absent. Those applications, in the case of the Republicans (but not the Democrats) were supposed to indicate voter ID numbers but were not because of a computer malfunction. The computer did not malfunction when the Democrats sent out their applications and thus their applications included the voter ID.

These were NOT ballots; they were APPLICATIONS for ballots. When the applications came in, and the Republicans realized what had happened, they asked the canvassing board for permission to insert the ID number on the applications. The Board said, (1) you can only do it here, in our office; and (2) you must not use state records to ascertain which ones to complete; you must use your own records.

No one complained about this until AFTER the election. All other counties permitted applications to lack voter ID numbers, but Seminole County didn’t. Gore’s lawyers were not supporting this particular law suit though they were supporting all the others.

Gore wanted all 15,000 absentee ballots to be tossed out, invalidated, despite the fact that there was nothing wrong with the ballots, which were all properly voted. Gore’s claim relied on the APPLICATIONS for the ballots.

Yet, there is nothing wrong with the Democrats sending out the applications with the voter ID numbers already indicated [that’s what the Democrats did in Seminole], so why did it become a disqualifying event if the ID number was filled in on the application (NOT the ballot) afterward? Democrats were able to complete the voter ID before the APPLICATION went out, but Republicans were not permitted to fill in the voter ID after the APPLICATION was received. Yeah, that’s fair :? .

Don’t point the accusing finger at the Republicans, unless you have clearly looked at the actions of the Democrats also.

14

Yeah right wolf. I suppose that means that you now reject all arguments posed by the likes of Rascal that assert that the US only goes to war when its own interests are at stake.

Why don’t you explain why my comment above is “laughable”?

I’m real interested in reading your reply, if you have one.

And why the wussy statements from you… “whatever merit my argument might have had”? That’s stupid… first because you didn’t comment on why it was or wasn’t with merit… and secondly, my initial argument was in regard to the election of GW Bush in the year 2000… how would my statement in reply to skeptic yank’s assertion in any way invalidate my initial argument.

You don’t make any sense. :unamused:

15

Math Against Tyranny based on research by Alan Natapoff.

[quote=“Will Hively”]In the seven games of the 1960 World Series, the New York Yankees outscored the Pittsburgh Pirates 55-27. But the Yankees lost the series 4 games to 3. Was this fair? Is it confusing? No, because we all know that points have to be grouped in a way that wins games. The Yankees won 3 games by 10 or more points, but lost the other four by a close score. In this same vein, votes need to be grouped in ways that win states. According to Natapoff, “that’s exactly how [Grover] Cleveland lost the series of 1888. He lost the five largest states by a close margin, though he carried Texas, which was a thinly populated state then, by a large margin. So he scored more runs, but he lost the five biggies.”

Hively believes, “that was fair, too. In sports, we accept that a true champion should be more consistent than the 1960 Yankees. A champion should be able to win at least some of the tough, close contests by every means available - bunting, stealing, brilliant pitching, dazzling plays in the field - and not just smack home runs against second-best pitchers. A presidential candidate worthy of office, by the same logic, should have broad appeal across the whole nation, and not just play strongly on a single issue to isolated blocs of voters.”

Natapoff concludes,“Experts, scholars, deep thinkers could make errors on electoral reform, but nine-year-olds could explain to a Martian why the Yankees lost in 1960, and why it was right. And both have the same underlying abstract principle.”[/quote]

16

I am a staunch supporter of the electoral college, despite its apparent flaws. Thus, I would not have objected had the situation been reversed.

I trust the judgment of James Madison (who essentially proposed the idea of an electoral college) far more than I trust Hillary Clinton (who favors abolishing the electoral college).

The Electoral College system as utilized by the US imposes two requirements on candidates for the presidency:

  1. that the winner obtain a sufficient amount of the popular vote to enable him to govern (even when that amount does not constitute an absolute majority), and

  2. that such a popular vote be sufficiently distributed across the country to enable him or her to govern.

This arrangement ensures a regional balance of support, which is vital in governing a large and diverse nation.

Look, despite colleges and universities around the world offering classes in “political science”, politics is anything but a science, at least in any type of a democracy. Effective politics in any democracy is actually an art, rather than a science… and it is an art which requires the ability to compromise.

Let me ask you this: If the US were to use a pure democracy and elect presidents based on the majority of the popular vote, why should states such as Alaska or Wyoming remain part of the United States? After all, if presidential elections were decided by simple majority of the popular vote, the populations of a few states (New York and California) would determine who would run our executive and what issues would be important and how those issues would be decided. Why, in such a situation, should the people of Alaska or Wyoming remain states in union with the United States?

The US style of democracy is a representative style (or a republic), and IMO, the primary distinguishing characteristic of the US style of democracy is that it allows generally rule by the majority with protection of the minority, or, stated another way, rule by the majority with the consent of the minority.

A pure democracy would merely permit 51% of the population to oppress the other 49%.

Well, no. Abolition of the electoral college would require ratification by a certain number of States, and since many States have only several electoral votes, they are not likely to give up the leverage that they do have in dealing with their more populated sister States.

17

I think the original point of the thread was that Bush was “selected” not “elected” … not on the merits or faults of the electoral college system, so I’ll answer to the former issue. I don’t support either the Republicans or Democrats … they’re both crap as far as I’m concerned. But, the original post that claims (along with many others) that Bush was “selected” is both reckless, and shows a clear misunderstanding of the Constitution and law in the United States (even though quite disenchanted with politics in the US recently, I still feel these two things form the bedrock of the American system, and are still strong, regardless of the day-to-day political bickering). Bush was NOT selected … the legal process was played out as it was meant to and was called for in the Constitution. Is it fair that Gore won the popular vote but didn’t become president? Maybe not … but that is a moot point. Where many, many other countries would fall into chaos after something like this, the United States did not, and the workings of the government did not miss a step. The process was followed, Al Gore was an exemplary statesman in the end when he ended the battle, and life goes on … I’m getting tired of people twisting things around and trying to say that Bush’s victory was “illegitimate” … that is complete and utter bulls**t. I don’t care for his policies, but he IS the president, and he is “legitimate”. 'Nuff said.

18

Why did somebody rate my initial post negatively? All I did was state the facts of the case and base my opinion on the same an request explanations from any who take a different view.

:unamused: Who is the wussy?

19

You mean like the 1962 Nixon-Kennedy election, when Nixon chose not to contest blatant vote fraud, favoring Kennedy, in Chicago (home of Mayor “King Richard” Daley’s Democratic machine)?

20

[quote=“taiwantim70”]The law states that ex-felons in Florida cannot vote which means 31% of all black men in Florida cannot vote because they have a felony on their record.

Blacks in Florida (and throughout the US) are Democrats. Al Gore received more than 90% of them on Nov. 7, 2000.[/quote]
Too bad – if they hadn’t robbed convenience stores, shot people, dealt drugs, and/or carjacked little old ladies, they could have voted for Gore. Since they committed crimes, well, too damn bad for them.

This probably didn’t come even remotely close to countering the vote fraud that the Democraps routinely engage in. Recall St. Louis, Missouri, where post-election checks found that dead people had miraculously voted, and where polls in Democratic areas were left open for hours after they were supposed to close, just so more Democratic votes could be recorded.

Yet John Ashcroft, despite having good cause, didn’t contest his election loss to a ghost.

Really? Then why aren’t you going after the Democrats??

Oh, and the “Nader-traders”, let’s not forget them. What a bunch of buffoons. They were calling Florida “Gore-safe” and having people in “contested Washington” vote for Gore while people in Florida were supposed to vote for Nader instead. That alone probably cost you fraudsters the election!