And the recounts (post-election, of course) show that Bush did win in Florida.
When you speak of Bush's victory in Florida as "highly debatable," do you know of a recount that showed Gore ahead of Bush in Florida? How many recounts does one need, anyway?
Or are you implying that there's any validity at all in the odd "butterfly ballot argument"?
Even so, there's no flaw in my response. ocean was arguing that Bush wasn't president (legitimately) because "Gore got more votes." All I did was remind him that there's this thing called the electoral college.
Yes. The comprehensive one ordered up by several media groups in tandem showed that Gore had quite a few more votes. Leastwise, more people got up there and tried to vote for Gore than Bush. Nor am I discussing "butterfly ballots" but simple overvotes where Gore was marked, then a second minor candidate. (Not that I think 3000 elderly Jews were attempting vote for Buchanon. Nor do I consider the scrub lists in Florida ethical, or legal. Jim Crow is quite alive in Florida.)
Here
According to the study, 5,277 voters made a clean punch for Gore and a clean punch for Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, candidates whose political philosophies are poles apart. An additional 1,650 voters made clean punches for Bush and Buchanan. If many of the Buchanan votes were in error brought on by a badly designed ballot, a CNN analysis found that Gore could have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.
Eighteen other counties used another confusing ballot design known as the "caterpillar" or "broken" ballot, where six or seven presidential candidates are listed in one column and the names of the remaining minor party candidates appeared at the top of a second one. According to the study, more than 15,000 people who voted for either Gore or Bush also selected one candidate in the second column, apparently thinking the second column represented a new race.
Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush.
However, the double votes on both butterfly and caterpillar ballots were clearly invalid under any interpretation of the law.
The last line is rather clear. I don't argue that Bush isn't President. I will state that Gore got more votes, as it's utterly true.
The biggest irony of all, of course, is comparing the Florida election system and the "equal protection" rationale applied by the US Supreme Court in their majority decision. Under that reasoning, not only was Florida's entire election illegal and invalid, but so was every other state's. After all, if not having a uniform standard from county to county on what is a clear vote (the reason the Supremes ended it), then certainly not having the same voting machines in every county, as well as the same ballot structure, is an equal protection violation. Different machines have different error rates (punch cards have an error rate roughly 10 times higher than optical scans), and rather obviously some ballot designs caused more miscast and thrown out votes than others.
Given that people's intended voting desires aren't uniform (that is, you cannot claim that a punch card machine in county X will throw out as many votes for Candidate A as B, because simple geopolitical makeup means that counties can and do tend to clump for a party or candidate. As noted in Election 2000, where punch card machines (with their higher error rate) existed almost solely in counties that were heavily Gore, whereas almost all the optiscan machines (lower error rate) were in Bush counties).
But, I repeat, I don't claim Bush isn't the President, or that he didn't legally win. He did that when he was certified. I merely claim that it's rather clear that he didn't get more votes overall (indeed, having quite a few less), and that it's highly debatable whether he would have won had the recount been performed.
The only way to determine a clear winner in Florida is to work out how many people
intended to vote for each candidate. Gore wins by ten to twenty thousand votes. However, by the number who successfully cast their votes, there's no way to tell. The difference remains well within the margin of error, a few hundred votes out of several million.