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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jerome who wrote (39789)	11/17/2000 11:39:56 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 70976

OT -- OK I don't want to add fuel to the fire and God knows this has been going on long enough. So let's look at this logically. It seems to me that the purpose of election is to respect the will of the people. If you agree on that, then you must agree that the margin of victory must be greater than the margin of error. There were some 6M voters in FL. That means that the margin of error is between 30,000 to 60,000 votes. So unless either candidate wins by greater than this number of votes, their win is meaningless as far as the spirit of the democracy is concerned. In other words, as it stands Bush's only claim is that he got lucky and the random error rolled in his favor. And Gore's aim is to toss up the coin again and hope that he'll get lucky on the recount. Note that even if Gore had had all the disputed PB votes, his "win" would have still been smaller than the margin of error. It is time we concede neither candidate won Florida and deal with the reality as such. If we really want to resolve the issue in a fair, that is fair to the people and not to the politicians, then there are 3 choices: (1) Recount the votes with a more accurate method and hope that a candidate wins with greater number of votes than the margin of error. (2) Redo the election in the entire state. Since the importance of the election has become clearer, more people will vote. Use a better way to collect and count the votes this time around. (3) Accept the reality that FL votes are a statistical tie and treat it as such. i.e. realize that no one won Florida and either split the electorates between the candidates. Or alternatively keep Florida votes out of this. I think the last option is the best. To be fair the same method should be applied to all states in which a candidate won by less than the margin of error. ST