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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: hmaly who wrote (128676)	11/17/2000 2:09:16 AM
From: Petz	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 1570196

harry, I see where you are coming from, that if Bush wins and the ignored hand-counts would have changed the outcome, that 1. Gore will continue suing, possibly leading to reversal 2. If GW won because Harris refused to certify PB; this recount will hang like an albatross around his neck and eliminate any mandate he could have had. My reason for opposing the hand recounts is that, if they were done twice by two different sets of people operating under the same "rules", the vote count would vary MORE after hand counting twice than it would vary after machine counting twice. Therefore the hand count is less accurate. The total vote count may be less with a machine count, but at least it is consistent and it is unbiased. I believe it was Broward county that said they were not going to do a hand count because the net vote change after selective hand-counting changed by X, but there were 3X disputes between the republican and the democrat which were decided by the tie-breaker committee. What is going to prevent a dishonest person claiming they are pro-Bush when they are really anti-Bush? Or vice-versa. It would take an extremely small number of such people to affect the result. You could argue that vote additions are rechecked by the committee, but the lack of a vote change in favor of Bush is not checked. Its not clear to me whether the recounts are checking every ballot or just the ones which have been classified as null votes by the machines. Do you know the answer to that? I agree that it would be politically more expedient to go along with Gore and recount the entire state of Florida. Based on the recounts I've heard of so far, Bush would win, but I think it would set a dangerous precedent -- first, that each county in a national election can make its own decision on a Presidential election, and, second that the responsibility for voting carefully and intelligently is removed from the voter. The latter point is that all the punch card voting systems are marked with warnings to fully press the punch holes and to inspect the punch cards when completed. Furthermore, the precincts are supposed to check the cards as they are handed in. If it is established that election officials have the "right" to interpret improperly punched ballots, then this result in chaos. I think Bush will escape the second "no-mandate" outcome, since I expect that the remaining absentees plus the 300 existing margin will be more than the number of vote changes in Broward and Palm Beach. Petz