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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (7200)	11/22/2000 3:03:10 PM
From: Dan B.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10042

Re: "I say it's not. It's not unfair because the rules were published, available to both candidates, and followed. The rules say that the candidate gets to identify which counties he wants counted and the county gets to decide whether or not to comply. That's what happened. It's not unfair." You've misinterpreted the rules, IMO. I did not mix apples and oranges, I was talking about exactly this, and the rules as you interpret them could NOT have been anticipated, because that GOREY(pardon, I'm getting heated)interpretation is not correct. You seem to separate the Hand-counts being done in some counties out...but that's what I'm talking about- ONE subject. Re: "I think a good case can be made that your change would make the rules fairer, but until it's changed, we go by the current rules and Bush wasn't treated unfairly under them." I understand you, but I believe the current rules were not intended to be as you think they are- and that's important. Hence, what's happened is NOT according to current rules(Bush's case all along). The rules do NOT recognize the advantage to one candidate from employing hand-counting, and hence they do NOT say "therefore, the other guy gets his chance in this regard." The rules only anticipated voting machine failures adversely affecting a candidate, thus he'd be allowed a timely hand-count. I believe the rules have been twisted in meaning, hence Gore's version of them could not have been anticipated, and from an unbiased point of view(I do believe), I'm glad Bush is fighting this travesty. Dan B

To: Lane3 who wrote (7200)	11/22/2000 8:04:48 PM
From: david james	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10042

Unfortunately, I don't think that any of the current Florida Laws were intended to handle undercounts. Most of the laws were intended to handle cases where one candidate got the other candidate's votes by either fraud or error - and a hand-count is certainly a reasonable remedy in such a case. As it is now with statistically significant errors due to undercounts, and with the election a statistical dead heat, any candidate with an undercount in one of their strong districts can gain votes in a hand count. These ballots should be counted as should every vote, but of course this just throws the ball in the other court. Personally, I think every vote nationwide for which a machine says "no vote" should be manually inspected. The counting of only this subset is what was proposed in Miama/Dade County, although they seem to have now passed on that idea. The trouble of this additional hand-counting should encourage districts to get machines that reduce the probability of such an error(it is almost impossible in my district in New York because of the nature of the machines, so in my district, there would be only a handful of ballots to be inspected.) Personally, it is starting to appear that the only way to determine the true "will of the people" is to send down to Florida all the machines that don't make these undercount errors, and let people revote - and include in the revote all of the military ballots that arrived late as well. I suspect the Bush people would veto that since the Nader vote and the Buchanen vote would virtually disappear. But it would be hard to argue that we did not see the "will of the people".