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To: Christiaan McDonald who wrote (14715)	11/20/2000 11:09:42 AM
From: James M. Bash	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21143

Apolitically and technologically speaking, the bottom line when using such obsolete and decades-old methodologies for tabulating votes on a vast scale in such an extremely close race is the margin of error is greater than the margin of victory. In such a circumstance, the result is essentially arbitrary, unknowable - in other words, a flip of the coin. The contest then becomes more of a tight chess match, as no one wants to concede when "the result" isn't substantially clear. And nowadays, in this country, when any course between two opposing parties is not plain or is "too close to call," the decision ultimately rests with the courts. So none of this seems very surprising (to me at least) in our democratic society. Hopefully the Supreme Court will make their decision (whatever it is) without much delay and we'll have an end to it, one way or the other. I for one am glad the creators of our electorate system allowed for better than two months between the day of the election and the day of inauguration - exactly for cases such as this, in the event of an unprecedentedly close race. Just doesn't wash too well with our "instant results" and gratification society these days I suppose... Next time hopefully we'll all have the touch-screen electronic voting like in California, or even better, secure and verifiable Internet voting.

To: Christiaan McDonald who wrote (14715)	11/20/2000 11:38:43 AM
From: jeffbas	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21143

Sore losers don't bother me, Ken. After all Nixon made the famous "You won't have me to kick around any more" comment after losing the CA governor race in the early 60's, if my memory serves me well. What I don't like is corruption and trying to steal the election. I disagree with James and Starowl. In my opinion, Katherine Harris was exactly right in her decision. When I was young, I worked with the IBM 1620 computer, one of the earliest. It read punch cards. It would have been a snap to program the computer to kick out any ballots not counted for any reason. Review of those by hand should have easily been done within the statutory week allowed to finalize the count. Recounting any ballots by hand with one single clearly punched hole for President is absolutely ludicrous. Any difference from the machine count of those is human error! (In all of those counties, the ambiguous votes are in the 10-20,000 range at most.) I would add that I used to sort and count punched cards all the time. Of course, the correct check was to hold a deck up to the light to see if the sorting hole went clear through the deck. I never had any problems.