>> To me "fair" is that we both know the rules going in <<
The rules called for a recount if the first count produced a narrow margin. Given the situation, it should have been a very careful process, uniformly applied to the whole state. Both sides could have signed off on the procedures, agreed to abide by the result and gotten a declaratory judgment from the Fla Supremes, if they needed to change the schedule.
One analysis is that the big change would have resulted from hand-counting the punch-card ballots, since the error rate is about 3% for machine counting and 0.3% for hand counting. This would help Gore, because the counties using punch cards vote Democrat. If 1 million ballots (of 6 total) are from those counties, it's effectively 27,000 votes that were uncounted the first time. If this splits 60-40 for Gore, it's a 5400 vote swing. Not up to the 18,000 margin of error, but closer to a definitive answer than Bush's 1K lead,
Faced with this back-of-the-envelope calculation, I'd do exactly what the Republicans have done -- claim that hand recounting would be a zoo and proceed to turn it into a zoo.
This is not reassuring to foreigners who parked money here under the impression that we have an exceptionally stable political system, and find that they're subsidizing a Late Roman Empire colisseum show. But I don't want to give away too much. The details will appear in my book "The Commodus Investor -- Capital Protection in Decadent Times". |
