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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: lexi2004 who wrote (72256)	11/13/2000 7:50:42 AM
From: Zoltan!	Respond to of 769667

That was a stupid opinion, for the following reasons: Recount 'Em All, or None at All By Ed Glaeser. Mr. Glaeser is a professor of economics at Harvard University and a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution. There is a well-known trick among statistical economists for biasing your data while looking honest. First, figure out which data points don't agree with your theory. Then zealously clean up the offending data points while leaving the other data alone. The key to maintaining academic dignity is to ensure that you do nothing to the data other than eliminate errors. But while this approach may seem to improve accuracy, it actually leads to biased results. If you only clean the offending data points, then you will disproportionately keep erroneous data that agrees with your prior views. This leads many scholars to believe that data that is partially cleaned at the discretion of a researcher is worse than bad data. This lesson from the ivory tower has a clear implication for the current mess in Florida. Hand counting ballots in only a few, carefully chosen counties is a sure way to bias the results. Even if hand counting is more accurate than machine counting, there is a clear bias introduced because Al Gore chose which counties to hand count. Mr. Gore has selected the state and counties where recounting has the best chance of helping him. This is exactly the same as cleaning other data selectively. Naturally, if this opportunity for selective recounting becomes the norm, the floodgates will open and any candidate who loses a close election would be foolish not to demand a recount. The immediate implication of this is clear. If there is to be recounting by hand, it cannot be selective. There needs to be total hand counting, not just within Florida, but across the U.S. in any state that was close. One candidate cannot be allowed just to choose where he wants the data cleaned. If this is prohibitively expensive, or time consuming, then it is better to leave the process unchanged than to introduce the selective recounting bias. More generally, one of the principal lessons of macroeconomics is that rules generally work better than discretion. This is as true in elections as any place else. Giving candidates influence over how election results are processed does not help democracy to accurately reflect the will of the people. Judicial discretion is not much better, as judges will be responding to cases selectively filed by candidates. Furthermore, judges determining elections will exalt the judiciary to a king-making role it should not have. While it certainly may be appropriate to ban butterfly ballots for all of eternity, and while reform of balloting procedures seems like a must, it is also clearly wrong to selectively recount certain areas. interactive.wsj.com

To: lexi2004 who wrote (72256)	11/13/2000 8:03:40 AM
From: John Carragher	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

November 13, 2000 Gore Challenge Undermines U.S. Democracy By William J. Bennett, a co-director of Empower America. Al Gore's transparent efforts to overturn election results that are unfavorable to him are doing terrible and lasting damage to the nation he has spent most of his adult life hoping to lead. As everybody knows by now, George W. Bush last week won the unofficial recount in Florida. Tomorrow, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris is scheduled to announce the official ballot results from all 67 counties; by Friday the state will tabulate ballots cast by Floridians overseas. The evidence indicated that last Tuesday's results would be upheld. But as everybody also knows, the Gore campaign began a massive campaign to subvert this outcome, including its most recent effort to insist on a manual recount in four predominantly Democratic counties. Gore campaign chairman William Daley has even suggested that unless Al Gore is awarded victory in Florida, the election will be illegitimate. "If the will of the people is to prevail," Mr. Daley said, "Al Gore should be awarded a victory in Florida and be our next president." To clarify some matters raised last week: The chief complaint made by the Gore campaign consists of the charge that the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County is "deceptive, misleading and confusing," and led many people to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan. Yet butterfly ballots have long been used without challenge. County Supervisor of Elections Theresa LePore, a Democrat, designed the ballots to make reading them easier for the county's elderly population. The ballots were sent out long before the election, approved by both parties and printed in advance in newspapers. No complaints were raised. There is nothing deceptive about the ballot (it has been used in places like Cook County in Illinois, the home of Mr. Daley) and no credible judge in America would find merit in the Palm Beach challenge. If the ballot was as confusing as the Gore campaign asserts, Mr. Buchanan would have won far more than 3,400 votes out of the more than 400,000 cast. As for the charge that 19,000 ballots in Palm Beach county were disqualified because more than one candidate was selected, there are two points to be made. First, a similarly high number of ballots was disqualified from the same county in 1996 (and 143,000 total state ballots were disqualified); and second, every jurisdiction in America discards ballots where two different candidates are selected. When citizens enter a voting booth we have the right to assume they will take the time necessary to understand the ballot and vote for only one candidate. To throw out an election based on the carelessness of a small fraction of the voting public would lead to chaos. But something else must be said. Since last Tuesday's election, we are seeing something unmistakable. It is the continuation of a persistent pattern that has characterized the Clinton-Gore years: the willingness to undermine constitutional government and place partisan political interests ahead of the good of the nation. In this instance, the Gore campaign is resorting to unprecedented tactics to ensure that its man becomes president. What is at stake here is something far more important than the political futures of Albert Arnold Gore Jr. and George Walker Bush. This is a deeply significant moment for American constitutional government, and one fraught with peril. Our democracy depends on people abiding by certain unwritten rules. One of them has been that presidential candidates who lose an election do not contest the loss unless there is evidence of massive fraud and abuse (which is clearly not the case in this election). If those unwritten rules are violated, it sets in motion events that could precipitate an authentic political crisis. If the Gore campaign continues down this road, it will establish precedents. Do we really want to get into the habit of contesting every state that is decided by a razor-thin margin? Do we want to arrive at a point where, in a close campaign, the losing candidate reverts to challenge after challenge? Is it healthy for our nation to endlessly search for voter grievances? Do we want to make it a commonplace practice for losing candidates to resort to manual recounts of counties that are favorable to them? Is it a good idea to force winning candidates to take actions they would rather not, so they can preserve their victories? There would be no end point to such challenges. Regrettably, and recklessly, during the past 100 hours the Gore campaign has begun to poison the wellspring of American democracy. We are beginning to see the early consequences: street demonstrations, protests, increasing acrimony and bitterness. Things will only get worse, far worse, if they prolong this ordeal. To use a favorite Gore campaign phrase, "You ain't seen nothing yet." Forty years ago, Richard Nixon had a far more compelling reason than Mr. Gore to challenge the 1960 election results, since we know fraud in Chicago and Texas helped swing the election to John Kennedy. But Nixon refused to challenge the results; the morning after the election he conceded. Nixon has been universally praised -- including by many liberals and Democrats -- for his gesture. He put his nation above his own ambitions. The same can be said of Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft, who last week graciously conceded defeat rather than pursue a court challenge after losing to a deceased candidate. But Mr. Gore has chosen a different path. Every day, it seems, he and his lieutenants pull a new trick out of their bag, challenge settled practices, and issue irresponsible threats and baseless accusations. The end game is clear: to throw sand in the machinery of democracy and destabilize American presidential politics. I hope, and still believe, these efforts will fail. But whether they do or not, Mr. Gore is well on his way to earning the scorn of his countrymen and a harsh verdict from history.