[IP] more on A nation (evenly) divided
Begin forwarded message:
From: Einar Stefferud <stef@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 29, 2004 2:21:47 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] A nation (evenly) divided
As I understand the Electoral College, the founders of our nation were
aware of
the possibility of tie votes and set the Electoral Collage to make a
decision
so as to avoid our government from collapse in the face of an
indeterminate vote.
The simple fact is that even with perfect voting systems is is possible
to
encounter a real tie vote, in which case the election is equivalent to a
flipped coin that landed and stood on its edge. Highly improbably but
not
provably impossible, so the means of resolving the election in an
uncontested
way, must be provided in the constitution.
And so it is, as I read the constitution and the Electoral Collage
rules.
As I see it, at worst, the Electoral Collage will essentially flip a
coin and
declare the outcome to be the decision. So we will not ever be without
a
resident!
I do not see how a solution can be found in any other way, when the
vote is
so close as to be indistinguishable from a dead tie. The whole
elaborate
structure of the Electoral Collage is primarily designed to prevent a
significantly serious deadlock.
All this is good as I see it, regardless of all the mumbling hordes that
rant on and on about how Bush Stole the election in 2000.
The other side of that argument is that Gore was trying his best to
solve the problem by meddling with he counting process with new "after
the fact" "laws"
enacted after the voting was completed in an effort to count votes
until Gore's
team found enough new votes to tilt the election results by some small
margin
that would be big enough to claim that Gore Won.
Thankfully, the Electoral College saved the day, with the Supreme Court
finding
that continued counting with partisans finding new votes on some large
enough
scale would very likely lead to a really serious deadlock and crisis.
So I vote to retain the Electoral College until something provably
better is
discovered;-)... And I would not argue against efforts to further
educate our
voting citizens to understand what all this confusion is about.
Cheers...\Stef
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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