Subject:
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Re: Question for the Conservatives out there
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Wed, 14 Jul 2004 17:27:32 GMT
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Viewed:
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1534 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Dave Schuler wrote:
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To be fair to Gore, though, the contested counties were the ones that showed
the irregularities, such as questionable “felon” rosters, questionable
butterfly ballots, questionable voting machines, and generally questionable
tactics of denying the vote to citizens who seemed coincidentally unlikely to
vote for Bush.
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I thought the issue was that they were unlikely to vote for Buchanan.
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A full recount wasn’t in order, or in any case that wasn’t the issue being
addressed. The issue was that certain precincts were identified to have
suffered from conspicuous glitches and procedural errors, and these were the
counties in which the recounts were requested. If other precincts were not
in question, then it would have been a waste of time and resources to recount
them.
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The issue was that the Democrats were only bringing known pro-Dem areas into
question in the first place. Voting errors occur all the time, and Gore’s
campaign wasn’t putting effort into making sure that no voters were being
disenfranchised. They were just trying to make sure that no Democrats were
being disenfranchised. That’s not a very equitable solution, which is why he
should have been arguing for a state-wide recount. Republicans would have been
whining just as bad as the Democrats if a selective recount had reversed the
vote, and Gore’s presidency would have been plagued by similar claims of
illegitimacy. Both sides were clearly vying for self-interest, not for anything
resembling voter equity. Bush’s chances were best with not recounting, since
that made his victory a sure thing. Gore’s chances appeared best with a recount
selectively targeted at pumping the Democrat vote.
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Really? Does that include the numerous and well-documented tactics by which
Republicans, specifically under Katherine Harris and Jeb Bush, worked to skew
the vote tallies in Dubya’s favor?
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The state-wide recount that was required by Florida state law in order to
disclose the true results of the voting process (Sunshine Act?) were reported to
have shown that Bush would have won regardless of the Supreme Court decision,
whereas Gore would have won with the full state-wide recount that he should have
been arguing for in the first place.
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And does it also include the negative 16,000 votes that Florida’s machines
plopped on Gore’s
total? What
was Dubya’s margin of victory in Florida? 600 votes? Well, if you correct
the 16,000, that changes Dubya’s 600 victory to a 15,400 loss.
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I don’t see any mention of where in Florida those -16,000 votes were tallied.
If they weren’t in the counties that Gore selected (and the claim that these
were tallied by an electronic voting machine strongly suggests they weren’t),
his selective recount wouldn’t have affected them. The big issue with the
counties he was going after was the fact that many people allegedly punched
Buchanan’s chad instead of Gore’s, but recounting all of those ballots still
yields a pro-Buchanan result. Only running a substitute election would change
that result in any significant manner.
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Do I correctly understand you to be claiming that concerns about the
subversion of the Constitution, the theft of the Whitehouse, and the
resulting four-years-worth of destruction of US domestic and foreign policies
are “whining?”
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I’m saying that when two groups are trying to lie, cheat, and steal their way
into a victory, for one group to complain about the other’s tactics is whining.
They’d be complaining about Bush’s policies regardless (it’s the fundamental
nature of politics), but if they really had their fingers on the pulse of the
nation, they’d realize that the vast majority of the public only cares about the
outcome of one presidential election right now, and it’s not Bush vs. Gore.
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Question for the Conservatives out there
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| (...) To be fair to Gore, though, the contested counties were the ones that showed the irregularities, such as questionable "felon" rosters, questionable butterfly ballots, questionable voting machines, and generally questionable tactics of denying (...) (20 years ago, 14-Jul-04, to lugnet.off-topic.debate, FTX)
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