[IP] A nation (evenly) divided
Begin forwarded message:
From: Tim Onosko <tim@xxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 28, 2004 1:04:29 AM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Subject: A nation (evenly) divided
Dear Dave Farber:
I think the great undiscussed issue is what to do with an election
that ends in a statistical dead heat, and it is one for which there is
obviously no Constitutional solution. As Americans, the value of our
votes is established by the admonition that a candidate can win or lose
by a single vote: ours. This is true, no doubt, in a race of limited
scope, such as a local election. But, on a national scale, it is
always possible, as we saw in November 2000, to be cast into a
situation like Florida, where no number of recounts may have ever
yielded a satisfactory answer to who actually won the state. The
different ways recounts were ordered, the rules by which they were
conducted, human error and the chaotic environment itself were likely
to have meant that no two recounts would have been the same. Anyone
who has taken the most rudimentary statistics course recognizes this as
the margin of error.
The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of how to solve such disputes,
and so we were thrown into the worst kind of court case possible, where
there was no precedent and precious little case law, and where the
outcome was assured to be determined by lawyers, not the law. Yet,
considering all of the public furor over the 2000 election, there has
been virtually no discussion about the underlying cause of the problem
or how to settle it if it happens again. Instead, we simply address
the voting methods -- punch cards and hanging chads are out, optical
ballots and e-voting are in. But there remains a margin of error in
every virtually voting and accounting method, and there is still no
Constitutional remedy for the statistical dead heat.
With polls that reflect a still a frighteningly evenly divided nation,
the possibility exists that some variant of the 2000 scenario might
once again play itself out without any better legal method of settling
matters. We don't need to live through this nightmare again, where
half the electorate inevitably feels disenfranchised for the next four
years.
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