Big Conspiracies

[akirlu]

Okay, tell me again about how you can only pull off election tampering when the margins are close and the conspirators are few? Gore won Florida by 30,000 votes. Not counting the folks who were prevented from voting at all. Pointer thanks to Geoff Arnold.

Update: Mea Culpa. Kos made a close reading error and corrected it downthread. Apparently the unambiguous overvotes were in fact only the small but definite margin that we've known about for some time.

Comments

[avram]

Well, that's still a pretty close margin. There were almost 6 million ballots cast in Florida, so a margin of 30,000 is about half a percent.

So why is it that the Democratic blogiverse is just dicovering the Florida overvote issue now, when there were articles written about it years ago?

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Actually, I've been aware of the overvoting issue for yonks. That the margin was so large was (erroneous) news. And yes, for purposes of this discussion, 30,000 votes is a large margin. Since then, we've been to the Washington State governor's race.

[voidampersand.livejournal.com]

You need to read all the way down to the second update on the post. The 30,000 was the difference between the overvote ballots that included Gore and the ones that included Bush. But many of those ballots were genuinely spoiled. If we narrowed it down to the ballots where the intent of the voter is unambiguous (basically Gore checked and Gore also written in), the numbers are smaller, but still for Gore. Here's the key quote from the professor that did the study:

If all of the votes had been counted in Florida, Gore would definitely have won, but his margin of victory would probably have been less than 10,000 votes and could have been as low as 100-200, depending on the criteria used in deciding how to count ballots with various types of ambiguities, e.g., those with partially punched chads, write-ins, etc.

Still this is a very important study and there is no way that we should be conceding any points to the right-wingers. Gore won the vote fair and square, and the election was stolen from him when the court stopped the count.

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Yes, I'd gone back to re-read and spotted the updates. As Kos points out, this is still important in that it actually analyzes and explicates the data, which the NORC study notably neglected to do, thus allowing any number of clueless or malign headline writers to disemble about the results.

[shikzoid.livejournal.com]

Okay, there were overvotes, undervotes, incorrect votes and votes that were not allowed to take place. Then there's the overseas military ballots that didn't conform to the postmark requirement. There were a lot of dirty tricks.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Question, and completely OT, sort of... How did you find Geoff's blog?

TK

[akirlu.livejournal.com]

Probably a link from you, yonks and yonks ago in the blogtime. Sometimes I just drop into blogs that I bookmarked back when and haven't looked at in a while.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I suppose I get to wait until Friday the 13th to point out yet another obvious factoid even worse than the stolen election: The massive racism of the election itself. The false felon reports disenfranchising (mostly) blacks, the reports of roadblocks and threats of intimidation (in FL and other states, notably MO and GA) and so on. There's no question that the majority of Americans wanted Gore in 2000 and even the ones lucky enough to slip through the right wing traps were the majority. If only the two Supreme Court justices with close family ties to the Bush campaign had recused themselves, as Roberts kept threatening to do by merely having a question raised on a potential issue...

And in 2002 and 2004... ah well, that's another impeachable offense...