Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

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

To: Neocon who wrote (75139)	11/15/2000 12:06:19 AM
From: 91fxrs	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

How nice.... Gore is looking for help from lawyers. VBG washingtonpost.com

To: Neocon who wrote (75139)	11/15/2000 1:14:55 AM
From: Frank Griffin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 769670

Good evening, Neocon. These folks in Palm Beach are capable of doing 25 bingo cards at one time. They can find a .05 cent error on a grocery bill. They are simply cooperating in the attempt to steal an election. Review the following: On election night, Democrats called Florida voters about problem 4.46 p.m. ET (2156 GMT) November 10, 2000 By John Solomon WASHINGTON — Faced with a cliff-hanger election, the Democratic Party directed a telemarketing firm on Election Night to begin calling thousands of voters in Palm Beach, Fla., to raise questions about a disputed ballot and urge them to contact local election officials. The Democratic National Committee paid Texas-based TeleQuest to make the calls Tuesday night — while polls were still open — alerting voters in the heavily Democratic enclave in Florida of possible confusion with the ballots they cast. "Some voters have encountered a problem today with punch card ballots in Palm Beach County,'' the script for the call said. "These voters have said that they believe that they accidentally punched the wrong hole for the incorrect candidate.'' "If you have already voted and think you may have punched the wrong hole for the incorrect candidate, you should return to the polls and request that the election officials write down your name so that this problem can be fixed,'' the script said. The firm took the names and numbers of voters who said they may have cast an errant ballot, providing the Democratic Party a list of about 2,400 voters in the county who thought they may have misvoted. If voters were about to go to the polls, the script called for the caller to instruct them to "be sure to punch Number 5 for Gore-Lieberman'' and "do NOT punch any other number as you might end up voting for someone else by mistake.'' Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus said the party had been making traditional get-out-the-vote calls all over the country Tuesday, but shifted gears in Palm Beach after hearing local news reports about possible voter confusion. "Once we were informed by local news accounts of the magnitude of the problem with confusion about the ballot, we shifted our scripts to make sure that people who were voting were aware of the questions and confusion around the ballot,'' she said. The maneuver indicates that long before Americans awoke to the reality of the Florida ballot dispute, Democrats were already mobilizing voters there. The concern has focused on Palm Beach, where 19,000 ballots were disqualified and hundreds of voters have said they mistakenly voted for Patrick Buchanan while trying to vote for Gore. Within hours of the phone campaign, hundreds of Democratic voters had called election officials in Palm Beach to complain they may have been confused by the ballot and voted for the wrong candidate. Some Palm Beach County voters have filed lawsuits seeking a new vote. The outcome of the dispute is key because George W. Bush is leading Gore by a mere 327 votes after a statewide recount. The winner of Florida will lay claim to the electoral votes needed to become the nation's 43rd president. The calls indicate that Democrats were concerned about Palm Beach problems even before they knew Florida's vote would end in a razor-thin margin, said American University political science professor Candice Nelson. "To the extent there have been accusations that Democrats didn't cry foul until they realized Wednesday that Bush may have won, this cuts the other way,'' she said. Nelson and other political and legal experts said the calls were perfectly legal but could have contributed to what appeared to most Americans to be a spontaneous explosion of concern in Florida the morning after the election. "I think those kinds of calls make perfect sense,'' Nelson said. "In terms of people getting riled up, it would be a tactic that might energize voters who might otherwise not have realized they may have mistakenly voted for the wrong candidate.'' Wade Scott, an account manager with TeleQuest, said Democratic Party officials contacted his company shortly before 6 p.m. EST Tuesday to make the calls. With only an hour to go before Florida polls closed, his company mobilized all of its telemarketers to make some 5,000 calls in less than 45 minutes, Scott said. "It was a very short burst of calling for our industry,'' Scott said. He said only about 100 of the voters in Palm Beach it contacted hadn't voted, and about 2,400 felt they may have made a mistake on the ballot.

To: Neocon who wrote (75139)	11/16/2000 11:20:45 AM
From: Johannes Pilch	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Were works of poetry under judgment I would give great weight to your line of reasoning. We of course do not judge poetry, but mere marks on a ballot. Determining whether such marks were made for Buchanan, Gore or Bush is, for a human, about as subjective and arbitrary as determining whether a person is blond or brunette. I do not think such determinations are as easy for a machine. Analogue to digital conversions are not as foolproof, in all contexts, as some would have us believe. So I think it quite possible a computer might overlook a ballot, due to some small ballot irregularity, that most humans would never overlook. Apparently, manual recounts have in the past been done precisely for this reason. As to the question of how we tell whether a chad has failed to be counted, I assume the chads are coded and therefore easily flagged as processed or skipped. If not, then they certainly ought to be. I think this question is nevertheless somewhat irrelevant. It but addresses a potential technical problem, not the question concerning the fairness of the manual recount. The technical problem is possibly solvable. But if it is true that ballot machines cannot make determinations as well as humans, then in this Florida case employing the machines will perhaps not accurately determine the will of Floridians. Machines are excellent for determining the obvious, whether a shape is round or square, for example. But they cannot tell, as well as humans, the manifold properties and fine characteristics of objects. Where votes are concerned, machines are excellent in helping us readily determine obviously selected candidates. But when the vote is very close, as it is in Florida, I do not think machines can, as accurately as humans, evaluate ballots to render a judgment that takes the finest valid issues in consideration. Concerning the 5pm deadline, I do not know Florida law, but I don't think this deadline was reasonable in these particular circumstances. It seems to me if the Legislature determines a manual recount enhances the fairness of the election, the Secretary of State should have supported the will of the legislature and allowed the recount to proceed to completion. Her deadline was such that a full recount would have been impossible. The simple reason that there was not enough time to finish the legally supported recount ought, without question, to have been sufficient enough to allow Floridians to take an extension for granted. But it seemed the Florida Secretary of State would force the 5pm deadline except for the most serious of reasons, such as the Second Coming of Christ, perhaps. I think she contradicted the spirit of the legislature and the purposes of the recount. Her deadline should have been reasonable, allowing a practical interval of time for all recounts to be finished. I think she, especially in view of her political biases, should have bent over backwards to be reasonable when faced with the will of the legislature. I will need to review the law to see if she was compelled by it to issue her particular deadline. But from my admittedly limited vantagepoint it appears she used the leverage the law affords her, to thwart the will of the legislature. Tricks of these sorts are acceptable in most cases, but not in the election of a president. I agree with you that someone with prior allegiances was going to be on the hot seat. Unfortunately that is not the issue. I think the Secretary of State allowed her allegiances to cloud her judgment, impairing her ability to be reasonable according to the will of law. You are exactly correct that her allegiances put pressure on her to bend over backwards to effect impartiality. This is one reason she should have given a reasonable deadline. But I think she did not much yield to the pressure. She did not bend over backwards, but was ruled by her politics.