Mag, interesting reading, but it assumes that someone other than the voter did these additional punches. If you want to use statistics, someone pointed to the fact that only in the Palm beach count (the "butterfly Ballot"), did Buchanan get such a high proportion (the guy plotted Buchanan votes against Bush votes and it shows what he calls an "outlier" ten times the average). Personally, I think we should not simply follow the Florida laws. One of the things it says (which is contradictory to other things like the seven days certification) is that counting should determine to the best extent possible the voter's intent. A tough one, since the Florida law does not provide tools to determine that intent in case of punch cards. Strangely enough, a Texas law (signed by Gov. Bush) does delineate such "voter's intent standards" for punch cards, and that outside law says that even dimpled punches should be counted as votes. I presume that in the absence of a Florida standard on "voters intent", "discretion" of each canvassing board is called in, and if some of these say, let see how they do it elsewhere, and to make sure, let see what the "opposition" think on "Voters intent" and adopt the Texas standard, it would be difficult to fault them.
I think that if the margin in Florida was not that narrow (now about .05% with the current 930 votes advatage to Bush), and that the nationwide popular ote was not swinging the other way (with Gore having a 250,000 votes advantage or .25%, five time as much as Bush' current advantage in Florida), we would not have everyone at each other throat.
I just heard a new "conspiracy teory" on the subject. It is all Jeb Bush's fault. He does not want Geoge W. to win, because that will almost surely eliminate him as a potential future contender to the "throne". He wants to keep that fight going and let Gore win, preparing the ground for himself in 2004. Any comment on this one? At least Jeb got a little more "megabytes" up in his top drawer.
Zeev |
