It seems pretty clear Malloy has in fact won, but unforced errors at various levels have unnecessarily cast doubt on the result.
It seems pretty clear Malloy has in fact won, but unforced errors at various levels have unnecessarily cast doubt on the result.
It’s kind of funny how these “unforced errors” always seem to favor the Democrats……
I’m talking mostly about “errors” in communications strategy and the like. I am 98% certain that, objectively, the votes that are ostensibly in question will not have any chance of affecting the outcome once this is all cleared up. The problem is that poor communications have made things seem much more in doubt than they really are. Malloy is gonna win by a good 4,000-6,000 votes, not due to any newly discovered “box of ballots” or other shenanigans, but simply because the late-reporting cities are heavily Democratic.
Yeah cause none of the election irregularities in Florida in 2000 or Ohio in 2004 favored Republicans at all. Clearly its just the Democrats out to steal elections!
What election irregularity favored the Republicans in Florida?
Uh, the incorrect purging of thousands of mostly African American voters from the voting rolls?
It’s odd that you’d challenge the Florida assertion, because the assertion about Ohio is the one I find more questionable.
The butterfly ballot fiasco also certainly favored Republicans, unless you believe in the “Elderly Jews For Buchanan” theory, in which case, uh, you’re a moron. Although admittedly, that was voter error, albeit aided by an arguably confusing (if well-intentioned) ballot design, not an “irregularity” in the same sense as a claim of intimidation or fraud.
P.S. Since we’re talking about Florida, I’m required by law to repeat my mantra:
FLORIDA. WAS. A. TIE.
^ that
And I don’t know if your reasoning is the same as mine.
Mine essentially follows from the point that you can never count that many paper ballots 100% accurately. Every time you count you will get a different number, either through interpretation or accident.
So the question becomes, at what resolution can we confidently count? I believe Florida was within the margin of error.
Exactly.
Elections are an tool of measurement. What they’re trying to measure is “the will of the voters who, being eligible to do so, chose to come out and vote that day.” Like any tool of measurement, they have a margin of error. Among the sources of error, off the top of my head:
* Some voters’ intent to vote goes unfulfilled due to long lines, missing ballots, etc. (“turned away at the polls”).
* Some voters’ intent to vote goes unfulfilled because of intimidation, misinformation, or state action of various sorts (the “voter roll purge” concept)
* On the other end of the spectrum, some voters vote who shouldn’t be able to (“voter fraud”)
* Some voters won’t accurately express their intent due to pure voter error (they don’t follow the directions, they do it wrong)
* Some voters won’t accurately express their intent due to hybrid voter/system error (confusing voting machines, confusing ballots, etc.)
* Some voters won’t accurately express their intent due to pure system error (entirely the machines’ or ballots’ fault)
* Some votes, although properly cast, won’t be properly counted due to counter error (human and/or machine)
* Some votes, improperly cast (due to voter and/or machine error) but still with an ascertainable voter intent that’s countable pursuant to the law, nevertheless won’t be properly counted, either because of error or because of different interpretations of said law at the fuzzy boundaries of voter intent.
* Math errors can occur in the count, which may not get caught and fixed.
Et cetera, et cetera.
It is simply impossible to reduce the margin of error to zero. To be clear, I believe you can get it much lower than it was in Florida in 2000. But even if you did, it would never be as low as 537 votes out 6,000,000. Are you kidding me? That’s INSANE.
I was researching this for a paper, and discovered something fascinating, at least to me: Florida wasn’t just the closest state presidential election in U.S. history that decided a national race. It was the CLOSEST ELECTION EVER, PERIOD (percentage-wise), in ANY state voting for president, in ANY year, regardless of whether the national race happened to hinge on the result of that state. And by a wide margin, too, as I recall. That is to say, Florida ’00 was FAR AND AWAY the closest state presidential election in the entire history of the country… that’s out of, like, 2,000 or so state presidential races since 1789, if I remember correctly… and, improbably, coincidentally, it just so happened that the national election hinged on it. (As I recall, the other states in the Top 10 Closest-Ever List didn’t decide anything nationally.) A truly freakish event, a once-in-a-millennium event for our democracy, most likely. Most people really don’t understand how rare it was. They talked about Ohio in 2004 as “the new Florida” or whatever. That’s nonsense. Ohio ’04 was a routine, kinda-close-but-actually-not-really-that-close election. Florida ’00 was freakish, bizarre, unprecedented, a statistical anomaly of the highest order.
Here you go. I forgot that I’d done a blog post about the issue I just mentioned.
And here’s a handy list:
So, yeah. Florida was a tie, and we almost certainly shall never see its like again (thank goodness).