KyrosL:
I disagree with your prediction that Gore will lose the recount. I fully expect that he will win the ballot by ballot recount currently in progress and that result will probably hold up in court.
On the other hand, I have to say that from what I have read, the notion that there must have been a large number of Gore votes mistakenly cast for Buchanan seems to me very far fetched. Basically, the argument for this proposition rests on the logic you used in your own post, namely, that Buchanan's numbers in Palm Beach County were so much higher than in comparable counties that he could not possibly have gotten so many votes.
I read on the Web reports last week that the Reform Party records reflect that they have over 10,000 registered Reform Party members residing in Palm Beach County and that this County was by far their strongest County in all of Florida. I don't know whether this is true or not, but I certainly haven't seen anything that would call that claim into question.
In any event, if it is indeed true that the Reform Party has 10,000 registered members residing in Palm Beach County, I cannot see why it is so hard to believe that perhaps 3,500 of them may have actually shown up at the polls on election day to vote for their Party's nominee for President.
Why does everyone else find this so implausible? I know, even Mr. Buchanan says that the votes must have been a mistake. But pretty clearly he wasn't in the voting booth with any of these voters, so he doesn't know any better than anyone else.
So I repeat: Why is it so implausible that Mr. Buchanan may have gotten 3,500 or so votes (out of approximately 450,000 cast in Palm Beach County) just because the County is preponderantly Democratic?
Seems entirely possible to me.
Lu Xun |
