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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Skeeter Bug who wrote (85209)	11/12/2000 3:12:50 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 132070

>>The Palm Beach County fiasco is fascinating, because you can make a fair case that the ballot confused about 5% of the electorate into either double-punching the ballot or voting for Buchanan instead of Gore.<< nadine, don't believe the political hack spin. first, nobody has every shown any data that gore lost out on all those votes. what they have done is stated that some folks punched both ballets and then mention some big number of ballots thrown out. clearly, the inference is that they were thrown out for the buchanan / gore issue. i am unaware of anybody saying that. Skeets, the hacks on both sides are spinning wildly but a few facts have emerged: 1. Palm Beach county is a predominantly Democratic and Jewish district. It had about 400,000 voters on Election Day and it went heavily for Gore. 2. Pat Buchanan got 3400 votes in this county when he didn't get more than 500 votes in any other Florida county. Even Buchanan agrees all those votes weren't meant for him. 3. Over 4% of the ballots, about 19,000, were invalidated for overvoting, undervoting, whatever. Any figure over 1% is very high. 4. There were complaints about ballot confusion on Election Day (before anyone knew how close the election would be), and an emergency notice was sent to precinct workers at 10:00 AM trying to lessen the confusion. The confusion was caused by the fact that Gore's name was the second listed, but Gore's punch-hold was the third from the top. 5. Florida law permits county officials to call for a manual recount if they want. Given these facts, I think that a reasonably objective observer can conclude that Gore lost some thousands of votes in Palm Beach County, somewhere between 3,000 and 15,000 votes, due to ballot confusion. This was a particularly interesting ballot screwup because it impacted one candidate more than the other, and the impact exceeds the margin of difference between the candidates in the state. So what do you do? County officials have elected to do a manual recount, as they are permitted to do.