|
I'm not going to respond tit-for-tat to Scott's posts (I'm sorta catching up here), but regarding the whole election 2000 thing...
We seem to have several people here (myself included) who have worked in politics. Anyone who tries to claim that their party follows the rules is full of shit. You can't follow the rules if you want to win.
Once it became obvious that the Florida situation was going to become a knock-down, drag-down fight, both sides did everything in their power to try to make it come out in their favor. Scott makes it sound like Gore and his team just sat by and waited for democracy to happen, while Bush, the Supreme Court, Katherine Harris, and the press spun their wheels in a vast conspiracy to disenfranchise the voters at all costs.
Bullshit. Both sides formed their strategy on how to win, and followed through on that strategy. Bush's strategy won. Gore was silly to try that selective recount business. It may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but in hindsight, it was a foolish strategy.
Anyone who has done any work in science knows that any instrument used to measure a quantity has an inherent margin of error. When the difference between two values falls within the margin of error inherent to the method of measurement, you must call the values equal.
That's exactly what happened in Florida. Their punchcard system of measuring the voters' intent was so poor, and the values so close, that it is <I>scientifically impossible</I> to determine who won the vote. So because that system failed, the decision had to be made somewhere else. Bush's strategy on how to ensure that decision was in his favor was the better of the two.
|