Re: Kerry won...
 

I wanted Kerry to win as much as the next guy and stories like this made me want to fight for a Democrat victory... 4 years ago. Gore won the popular vote and it was so close that it made sense to fight. In fact the Democrats should have fough a lot harder.

Not this time though.

Kerry lost the popular vote by about 4,000,000. Enough about how he really won, because he didn't. I probably am bothered by this as much as you are but it's the truth.

Regards
Brad S

Re: Kerry won...
 

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Gore won the popular vote and it was so close that it made sense to fight. In fact the Democrats should have fough a lot harder

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How much harder could you fight?

They manufactured votes, brought phony lawsuits, spun like crazy....

He clearly lost, but convinced a lot of people that he somehow won. Gore is a sore loser, Kerry is a realist.

Re: Kerry won...
 

Palast is really out there....somewhere.

Re: Kerry WOULD have won...
 

[ QUOTE ]
What wasn't expected was that once I filtered out all that background noise, I started hearing a calm, resonable, and powerful head-voice saying things like "Kerry doesn't have the experience we need in these troubled times." and "Give Bush a chance to make it better."

Anyone who knows me KNOWS these are not my thoughts! And besides, I voted last week. No, there's no way in Hades these are my thoughts.

Gods-damn it! The f*cking Republicans have got Magical help pumping out a clear, unified, focused broadcast, and you can be sure, every sensitive is picking it up...

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Glad to see someone noticed the 'campaigning' I did this election year [img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

Re: Kerry won...
 

I won't say that I'm bitter as to the outcome of the election. I would've liked it to have gone otherwise, but, well, what happens happens.

That said, I will agree; I think Bush deserves the presidency as he did win the popular vote by a substantial margin. However, I don't think that the issue of these spoiled ballots should be overlooked as it is most likely going to be.

I bring up Palast's article not because I think that Kerry should be the current president of the United States, but because he points out some very tragic flaws in our election system--flaws that could potentially change the outcome of an election. It's unfortunate that these problems go relatively unnoticed and I think that the existence of such problems should be absolutely apalling to everybody, liberals and conservatives alike.

I find it troubling that some people found it more constructive to tell me to shut up and to quit being a sore loser than recognize the fact hundreds of thousands of Americans are, in many cases, not getting the representation to which they are entitled.

Re: Kerry won...
 

[ QUOTE ]
How much harder could you fight?

They manufactured votes, brought phony lawsuits, spun like crazy....

He clearly lost, but convinced a lot of people that he somehow won. Gore is a sore loser, Kerry is a realist.

[/ QUOTE ]

I'm sure we have each done our own homework on this one and I don't intend to argue the 2000 election here in any great length.

My point is, Gore won the popular wote and in many people's minds, that made him the most reasonable choice for president with so much controversy surrounding Florida's statistical dead heat.

This time around, that is simply not the case (even if Ohio actually was close).

Can we agree on that?

Regards
Brad S

Re: Kerry won...
 

This article was obviously written by someone in a severly delusional state. Apparently, the exit polls, where you only ask about 2% of the voters are accurrate and the vote where some small percentage is thrown out due to the voters own incompetence is untrustworthy. This is idiotic. Kerry obviously lost Ohio, and I will show you why. Bush won the counted vote by 136,483. According to this article, there are 247,672 uncounted votes (most provisional ballots are illegal anyway, but lets go ahead and included them). So what percentage of this 247,672 must Kerry win to actually win Ohio by 1 vote? 77.55% to win by 1 vote. Did Kerry win 78% in any state? I don't think any reasonable person would believe that these votes could possibly break this much in Kerry's favor. Case closed. Kerry lost Ohio by a quite significant margin.

I assume a little similar common sense applied to the New Mexico part of this article will show that these "uncounted" votes would have to break in an enormous way for Kerry for him to win and it can equally be discounted. Furthermore, Bush didn't need New Mexico to win, since the House would break a 269 to 269 tie and they would obviously re-elect Bush. The New Mexico part of this article is therefore irrelevant.

Re: Kerry won...
 

[ QUOTE ]
This article was obviously written by someone in a severly delusional state. Apparently, the exit polls, where you only ask about 2% of the voters are accurrate and the vote where some small percentage is thrown out due to the voters own incompetence is untrustworthy. This is idiotic. Kerry obviously lost Ohio, and I will show you why. Bush won the counted vote by 136,483. According to this article, there are 247,672 uncounted votes (most provisional ballots are illegal anyway, but lets go ahead and included them). So what percentage of this 247,672 must Kerry win to actually win Ohio by 1 vote? 77.55% to win by 1 vote. Did Kerry win 78% in any state? I don't think any reasonable person would believe that these votes could possibly break this much in Kerry's favor. Case closed. Kerry lost Ohio by a quite significant margin.

I assume a little similar common sense applied to the New Mexico part of this article will show that these "uncounted" votes would have to break in an enormous way for Kerry for him to win and it can equally be discounted. Furthermore, Bush didn't need New Mexico to win, since the House would break a 269 to 269 tie and they would obviously re-elect Bush. The New Mexico part of this article is therefore irrelevant.

[/ QUOTE ]

It's clear that you fail to understand two key things.

1.) Voter incompetence is not to blame for discarded ballots, rather, they are a product of faulty ballot-punching machines commonly found in low-income minority precincts. And, according to this article, these faulty machines can affect up to 2.68% of the voting population.

2.) The precincts where the majority of these discarded ballots originate are overwhelmingly democratic areas where is it quite possible for 80% of a local population to vote for a given party. (Washington D.C. for example, a relatively small area, voted 90% Kerry, 9% Bush)

And you're still missing the point. A significant number of people are voting and are not being counted. Apparently, that doesn't seem to bother you, especially since it worked in your party's favor.

Re: Kerry won...
 

The argument seems to be that African Americans aren't bright enough to vote properly with punchcard ballots, so nearly all of the "spoiled" ballots would have gone to Kerry. Note, this is not my belief, this is my interpretation of the beliefs of the writer of this article. I think punchcard ballots are obsolete and should be phased out. OTOH, I think anybody (of any race) who isn't bright enough to make sure they get punched properly deserves to have their votes voided. FYI, I voted for Kerry and I am disappointed in the result of the election, but this is just plain silly. I can believe that Florida might well have been miscounted in 2000 resulting in the election being won by the wrong man, but to claim that punchcard problems in Ohio, created a 100,000+ vote margin is just plain silly. This clown seems to think that exit polls are more reliable than the actual count. I think maybe the people conducting the exit polls need to examine their sampling methods and figure out where the bias came from.

Re: Kerry won...
 

Gore's biggest mistake in 2000 was not demanding a recount of the whole state. IIRC, the recount conducted by some journalists concluded that had the counties he wanted recounted been recounted, he would have lost, but if the whole state had been recounted, he would have won. His position would have been much more credible had he not tried to cherry pick counties to recount that were heavily Democratic. He would have had much more credibility if he had asked for the entire state to be recounted. Whether Supreme Court would have allowed that to happen is another question. To put it bluntly, he tried to steal an election that he probably had actually won.