On November 8th, after it became clear how incredibly close this election would be, I think both camps made the same series of calculations. They looked at:
The voting populations in each county,
The voting patterns in each county,
The voting machine types used in each county, and
The error/miss rates of each machine type.
Turns out, the majority of voting population using the old punch card machines, with their 2% error rates, were in Democratic areas. The majority of the voting population using the new scanning machines, with a 0.3% error rate, were in Republican areas.
Therefore a manual recount, which would find missed votes, would benefit Gore more than Bush. This is assuming no bias, and no guessing at dimpled chads.
Both camps came to the same conclusion. The Democrats filed for recounts in the large punch card counties. The GOP began crying in unison: 'manual recounts are unheard of! unreliable! chaotic! vote invention!' etc., etc. Remember, the cries began before any recount actually happened.
The rest is history. |
