| WIKI | FAQ | Tech FAQ | |
 http://csua.com/feed/ | |
| ||||||
| 5/24 |
| 2004/8/26 [Politics/Domestic/California, Politics/Domestic/President/Bush] UID:33158 Activity:insanely high |
8/26 Why is there still this misconception? Wouldn't everyone be better
served if at the least the truth is known? Quoting from below:
\_ "Your media"? Anyway, some major news
organizations (NYT included, I think) did a full
manual recount of the state and showed that under
most recount rules if there had been a full
recount Gore would have won Florida. Of course
this happened several months after the Supes
appointed GWB, so by then it was a moot point and
it didn't get a lot of press.
\_ Actually, you are exactly wrong. The study
you referred to (done by the National Opinion
Research Center, commissioned by NYT, CNN,
etc.) showed that Bush would have won by
493 votes had there been a recount. And, no,
it didn't get a lot of play in the media.
http://csua.org/u/2b5
\_ Good article and thank you. Your single
statement from it is exactly true but
the article says a great deal more. I
suggest people read it. -- ulysses
\_ This NORC???
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CarolASThompson/NORC.htm
\_ Rehashing the recounts is pretty pointless, I'll agree. But the
larger concern is Florida's continued registrar shenanigans.
\_ There is a lot of anger over the recount that is unjustified,
given the above link. We can argue over politics, but I hope
we can all agree there should be more civility in our
argument. These kinds of misconception make civility impossible.
\_ The misconception about how the votes went down in Fl'2k is still
being perpetrated because the more you tell the big lie, the more
people will believe it and get mad because they won't do their own
research into the truth which is that in all the ways the votes
were being counted and recounted, Gore lost, no one was appointed
President and it pisses off the left to no end. Had Gore only won
his own home state, it wouldn't have mattered what happened in Fl
anyway.
\_ You are precisely a victim of the kind of propaganda you decry.
Read the NORC link above.
\_ I read it before posting, thanks. What next? You're going
to tell me that there was a huge conspiracy across Florida
between Jeb Bush, the police, and the dog catcher's union to
prevent blacks from voting?
\_ I would sincerely hope that a Cal CS student would know
what precision of measurement is. The above link very
clearly shows that Bush won under some methods of
counting and Gore under others. Which you still deny,
even though the evidence is right in front of your face.
You are either 1) insane, 2) lying or 3) unable to
read and comprehend English at a 12th grade level.
I suspect #1, actually.
\_ Gore did not win under any method that was actually
being proposed to count ballots. He won only under
a method that neither side suggested which was
fabricated by the media counters so people like you
could claim there was bizarre circumstance under which
Gore won. Bush won under all the ways the votes were
being counted. By the courts. Not by the media who
was making up more ways to do it, although Bush won
under some of those methods as well.
\_ This is false as well. By the standards set
by the Florida Supreme Court: "one in which there
is a clear indication of the intent of the voter"
Gore would have won, due to the overvotes that both
marked him clearly and had his name written in.
This was what the State of Florida law required,
but the US Supreme Court ruled that there was not
enough time to conduct this recount. Remember that
the Bush team did everything it could, both
legally and illegally, to delay that recount.
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html
Just admit that the vote was "tied" by any
reasonable interpretation of the results. In
our legal system, "ties" go to the courts to
adjudicate. This one belonged in the Florida
State Supreme Court, but in a maneuver so suspect
that even they claimed that it was not precedent
setting, the USSC took it away from them. That's
\_ Would you have preferred the method of the
1876 election? Then Bush would have won.
the breaks, I say, but it is Constitutionally
suspect and the reason there remains a cloud
over the results. The Bush Administration from
the very start believed that they didn't have
to answer to the rule of law. Thanks for
reminding me all all that, btw, I am going to
donate another $100 to the John Kerry campaign.
\_ A Federal election is a state court issue..
huh!? Read article 2 and Amend. 14, the
implication is obvious. The legislature has
plenary, manifest authority over the choice of
electors - period! What provision of
Federal or Fl. state stature talks about
'ties go to the courts' - that statement
tells me you have no understanding of
the law or intent of the Const. authors.
This has been discussed an nasaeum, the
decision was 7-2 and Bush won under every
possible scenario except the bizarre one you
promote. If one extrapolated these absurd
scenarios far enough you could probably make
Buchanan win too - he should have sued!!!
\_ I would say that the article showed that Gore would
have won under the most permissive interpretation of
ballots, and Bush under more generally accepted
methods of interpretation.
\_ Are you the same guy that claims that "in all the
way the votes were being counted and recounted
Gore lost"?
\_ Nope. I'm the Gore-would-have-won-under-the-
most-permissive-interpretation-and-Bush-
everything-else guy. The in-all-ways guy is
someone else. |
| 5/24 |
|
| csua.org/u/2b5 -> www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html jpg A county employee shows a ballot to a National Opinion Research Center coding team. The coders marked their observations on specially designed, triplicate coding forms. WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the US Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W Bush would still have been elected president. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN. NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings. As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote. In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result -- that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in US politics. Florida Supreme Court recount ruling On December 12, 2000, the US Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The US Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast. Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the US Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore. Gore's four-county strategy Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted -- a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election -- by a 225-vote margin statewide. The news media consortium then tested a number of other hypothetical scenarios. Use of Palm Beach County standard Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore. Inclusion of overvotes In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes. jpg A county worker displays an optical scan ballot through a viewing window. The butterfly and caterpillar ballots One of the most controversial aspects of the Florida election was the so-called butterfly ballot used in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County. Many voters came out of the polls saying they were confused by the ballot design. 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. Limits of the study The National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago study was commissioned by eight media companies -- The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, CNN, the St. jpg A county worker displays a punch-card ballot to a NORC coder. NORC used experienced staff researchers to supervise and train a larger pool of investigators, who then fanned out across Florida and personally examined 175,010 ballots provided by local election officials. The investigators recorded exactly what they saw on each ballot but made no attempt to determine whether the vote should have been counted. From there, the media consortium took over, analyzing the raw data produced by NORC and drawing conclusions for various hypothetical scenarios. As with any large-scale study, the NORC data is subject to some important limitations. NORC reported serious problems with record keeping at many local election offices. NORC relied on these offices to produce the rejected ballots, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. Although trained to produce accurate, impartial reports, the NORC investigators are human and prone to human judgment and error. In particular, NORC discovered that male investigators were more likely to record marks on ballots than women. NORC also found a slight but statistically significant relationship between candidate marks and the investigators' party affiliation. Most importantly, there is no guarantee that the judgments of the NORC investigators would have matched those of local election boards had the recount been permitted to proceed under any scenario. |
| ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/CarolASThompson/NORC.htm The National Opinion Research Center In 1941, President Roosevelt created the Office of the Coordinator of Information, with Gen. In 1942, this was split into the "white" (official) propaganda, which eventually became the Office of War Information, and the "black" (unacknowledgeable) activities, under Donovan's Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The OWI employed Paul Lazarsfeld, Elmo Roper, and Frank Stanton. Donovan's longtime Wall Street crony, John J McCloy (later president of the Ford Foundation), established the highly secret Psychologic Branch within the War Department General Staff G-2 (Intelligence) organization. William S Paley and Douglass Cater were employed by the Army Psychological Warfare Division. The Frank Stanton Page "At least a half-dozen of the most important centers of US communication research depended for their survival on funding from a handful of national security agencies. Their reliance on psychological warfare money was so extensive as to suggest that the crystallization of mass communications studies into a distinct scholarly field might not have come about during the 1950s without substantial military, CIA, and USIA intervention. "Major beneficiaries included the Bureau of Applied Social Research, the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan, the National Opinion Research Center, the Bureau of Social Science Research, the RAND Corporation, and the Center for International Studies at MIT Moreover, this list must be regarded as preliminary at this time." Exerpt, The Science of Coercion / Centre for Research on Globalisation NORC was founded in 1941 at the University of Denver by Harry Field, of the Office of War Information. Field was killed in a plane crash in 1946, while traveling to set up similar organizations in other countries, and Clyde W Hart, "a former University of Iowa sociologist, who had been special administrator to Chester Bowles in the Office of Price Administration and who had worked closely with NORC on several national surveys for OPA during and immediately after the war," took over and moved it to the University of Chicago. NORC History 2 / NORC "A great deal of important research was done under Clyde Hart's direction, most with grant support from foundations such as Carnegie and Ford. Included among these surveys were Shirley Star's pioneer study of public attitudes toward mental illness, the first occupational prestige survey, early research on race relations, studies of radio listening and television viewing, and the first comprehensive survey of family medical costs. During the McCarthy era, NORC worked closely with and collected the data for Samuel Stouffer on his famous study of Americans' attitudes toward communism, conformity, and civil liberties, and with Paul Lazarsfeld and his colleagues at Columbia on 'The Academic Mind,' a survey of college and university professors on the effects of Senator McCarthy's anti-communist crusade." NORC History 3 / NORC "In 1953 the National Opinion Research Center began a series of surveys separated by five-year intervals on the consumer's use of medical care, the degree of health insurance protection, and expenditures for care (Anderson and Anderson, 1967)." In: Toward a Health Statistics System for the 21st Century: Summary of a Workshop. Other trustees included D Gale Johnson, Dean of the Division of Social Sciences at the U of C (president); H Stanley Bennett, Dean of the Pritzker School of Medicine at the U of C; Peter H Rossi was NORC's Director, and Jacob J Feldman was its Research Director. The Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences H Stanley Bennett H Stanley Bennett, Dean of the Division of the Biological Sciences, announced the appointment of Leon Orris Jacobson as Chairman of the Department of Medicine at the University of Chicago, Nov. Jacobson was one of the longest-serving members of the Scientific Advisory Board of the TIRC/CTR (1954 to 1992). The CTR Was a Lasker Loot-A-Thon (Jacobson) Bennett was a Trustee of the Salk Institute, circa 1971. He was then a professor of biological and medical sciences, Chairman of the Department of Anatomy, and Director of The Laboratories of Reproductive Biology at the University of North Carolina. Department of Biostatistics began searching for a new chair. Paul Meier, who was visiting Harvard from the University of Chicago, told Nan Laird that he thought Fred Mosteller would become chair of biostatistics. In February 1977, Fred Mosteller became chair of biostatistics.... Mosteller / Harvard University Mosteller was a member of the "Planning Study for an Ongoing Study of Costs of Environment-Related Health Effects," 1980. Other members included Theodore Cooper, Philip J Landrigan, Joshua Lederberg, and Arthur C Upton. Mosteller was chairman of a workshop and drafting session on data linkage attended by Landrigan and by Jacob Feldman, Thomas Hodgson, and Dorothy P Rice of the NCHS. Costs of Environment-Related Health Effects, p 211 / National Academy Press 1981 Mosteller wrote the Foreword of "News and Numbers A Guide to Reporting Statistical Claims and Controversies in Health and Other Fields," by Victor Cohn (Center for Health Communications, Harvard School of Public Health, 1989). Cohn said that Mosteller was his "main mentor and guide in the preparation of this book." News and Numbers, 1989 / tobacco document George P Schultz Shultz taught at MIT from 1948 to 1957, except for a leave of absence in 1955 to serve on the President's Council of Economic Advisors. In 1957, Shultz was Professor of Industrial Relations at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, and eventually became its Dean. "From 1968 to 1969, he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford." He was US Secretary of Labor from 1969-70, Director of the Office of Management and Budget 1970-1972, and Secretary of the Treasury from 1972-74. He was President and a director of the Bechtel Group from 1974 until 1982, when he left to become Secretary of State until 1989. Shultz bio / Hoover Institution Shultz was a director of Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was a director since 1993; Roger S Penske, CEO of Detroit Diesel who was a director of Philip Morris from 1991 to 1998; former US Secretary of State Henry A Kissinger and former Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin L Powell were also directors. AirTouch 1998 DEF 14A / Securities and Exchange Commission Shultz has been a director of Gilead Sciences since 1996. Other directors included Donald Rumsfeld, the Chairman of the Board from 1998 until resiging in 2001, who was a director since 1988; Gilead Sciences 2003 DEF14A / Securities and Exchange Commission Shultz has been a director of Charles Schwab Inc. Former postmaster general Anthony Frank, also a director of General American Investors, was a fellow director. Board of Directors / UNext Jacob J Feldman The Tobacco Industry Research Council (TIRC) funded a study which was originally proposed by Elihu Katz, then an Associate Professor of Sociology at the U of C, then finished by then-graduate student Bruce Straits. "Mr Jacob Feldman, Director of Research, National Opinion Research Center, who has been quite interested in this subject, will also serve as a consultant." The study was "Sociological and Psychological Correlates of Adoption and Discontinuation of Cigarette Smoking." Katz bio / University of Haifa From 1971 to 1973, Feldman was on the Financial Data Year Planning Subcommittee of the National Committee on Vital and Health Statististics, along with Dorothy P Rice, a primary originator of the Big Lie that smoking is an economic burden to society. Rice was the Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Office of Research and Statistics, Social Security Administration. NCHS VHS 1973 Annual Report (pdf) Feldman was a member of the Advisors and Task Force of "Feeling Good," a series of 26 hour-long programs by the Children's Television Workshop, which aired on 250 Public Broadcasting Service TV stations in 1974-75. Joan Ganz Cooney, now a director of Johnson & Johnson, was president of CTW, and Ruby Hearn of ... |
| supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html I On December 8, 2000, the Supreme Court of Florida ordered that the Circuit Court of Leon County tabulate by hand 9,000 ballots in Miami-Dade County. The Supreme Court noted that petitioner, Governor George W Bush asserted that the net gain for Vice President Gore in Palm Beach County was 176 votes, and directed the Circuit Court to resolve that dispute on remand. The court further held that relief would require manual recounts in all Florida counties where so-called "undervotes" had not been subject to manual tabulation. Governor Bush and Richard Cheney, Republican Candidates for the Presidency and Vice Presidency, filed an emergency application for a stay of this mandate. On December 9, we granted the application, treated the application as a petition for a writ of certiorari, and granted certiorari. On November 8, 2000, the day following the Presidential election, the Florida Division of Elections reported that petitioner, Governor Bush, had received 2,909,135 votes, and respondent, Vice President Gore, had received 2,907,351 votes, a margin of 1,784 for Governor Bush. Because Governor Bush's margin of victory was less than "one-half of a percent . Vice President Gore then sought manual recounts in Volusia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami-Dade Counties, pursuant to Florida's election protest provisions. A dispute arose concerning the deadline for local county canvassing boards to submit their returns to the Secretary of State (Secretary). The Secretary declined to waive the November 14 deadline imposed by statute. The Florida Supreme Court, however, set the deadline at November 26. We granted certiorari and vacated the Florida Supreme Court's decision, finding considerable uncertainty as to the grounds on which it was based. On December 11, the Florida Supreme Court issued a decision on remand reinstating that date. On November 26, the Florida Elections Canvassing Commission certified the results of the election and declared Governor Bush the winner of Florida's 25 electoral votes. On November 27, Vice President Gore, pursuant to Florida's contest provisions, filed a complaint in Leon County Circuit Court contesting the certification. eceipt of a number of illegal votes or rejection of a number of legal votes sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election" shall be grounds for a contest. The Circuit Court denied relief, stating that Vice President Gore failed to meet his burden of proof. He appealed to the First District Court of Appeal, which certified the matter to the Florida Supreme Court. Accepting jurisdiction, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed in part and reversed in part. The court held that the Circuit Court had been correct to reject Vice President Gore's challenge to the results certified in Nassau County and his challenge to the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board's determination that 3,300 ballots cast in that county were not, in the statutory phrase, "legal votes." n this record, there can be no question that there are legal votes within the 9,000 uncounted votes sufficient to place the results of this election in doubt." A "legal vote," as determined by the Supreme Court, is "one in which there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter. The court therefore ordered a hand recount of the 9,000 ballots in Miami-Dade County. Observing that the contest provisions vest broad discretion in the circuit judge to "provide any relief appropriate under such circumstances," Fla. to do so forthwith, said tabulation to take place in the individual counties where the ballots are located." The Supreme Court also determined that both Palm Beach County and Miami-Dade County, in their earlier manual recounts, had identified a net gain of 215 and 168 legal votes for Vice President Gore. Rejecting the Circuit Court's conclusion that Palm Beach County lacked the authority to include the 215 net votes submitted past the November 26 deadline, the Supreme Court explained that the deadline was not intended to exclude votes identified after that date through ongoing manual recounts. The Supreme Court therefore directed the Circuit Court to include those totals in the certified results, subject to resolution of the actual vote total from the Miami-Dade partial recount. The petition presents the following questions: whether the Florida Supreme Court established new standards for resolving Presidential election contests, thereby violating Art. With respect to the equal protection question, we find a violation of the Equal Protection Clause. II A The closeness of this election, and the multitude of legal challenges which have followed in its wake, have brought into sharp focus a common, if heretofore unnoticed, phenomenon. Nationwide statistics reveal that an estimated 2% of ballots cast do not register a vote for President for whatever reason, including deliberately choosing no candidate at all or some voter error, such as voting for two candidates or insufficiently marking a ballot. In certifying election results, the votes eligible for inclusion in the certification are the votes meeting the properly established legal requirements. This case has shown that punch card balloting machines can produce an unfortunate number of ballots which are not punched in a clean, complete way by the voter. After the current counting, it is likely legislative bodies nationwide will examine ways to improve the mechanisms and machinery for voting. B The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States unless and until the state legislature chooses a statewide election as the means to implement its power to appoint members of the Electoral College. History has now favored the voter, and in each of the several States the citizens themselves vote for Presidential electors. When the state legislature vests the right to vote for President in its people, the right to vote as the legislature has prescribed is fundamental; and one source of its fundamental nature lies in the equal weight accorded to each vote and the equal dignity owed to each voter. The State, of course, after granting the franchise in the special context of Article II, can take back the power to appoint electors. here is no doubt of the right of the legislature to resume the power at any time, for it can neither be taken away nor abdicated") (quoting S Rep. The right to vote is protected in more than the initial allocation of the franchise. Equal protection applies as well to the manner of its exercise. Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms, the State may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value one person's vote over that of another. It must be remembered that "the right of suffrage can be denied by a debasement or dilution of the weight of a citizen's vote just as effectively as by wholly prohibiting the free exercise of the franchise." There is no difference between the two sides of the present controversy on these basic propositions. Respondents say that the very purpose of vindicating the right to vote justifies the recount procedures now at issue. The question before us, however, is whether the recount procedures the Florida Supreme Court has adopted are consistent with its obligation to avoid arbitrary and disparate treatment of the members of its electorate. Much of the controversy seems to revolve around ballot cards designed to be perforated by a stylus but which, either through error or deliberate omission, have not been perforated with sufficient precision for a machine to count them. In some cases a piece of the card-a chad-is hanging, say by two corners. In other cases there is no separation at all, just an indentation. The Florida Supreme Court has ordered that the intent of the voter be discerned from such ballots. For purposes of resolving the equal protection challenge, it is not necessary to decide whether the Florida Supreme Court had the authority under the legislative scheme for resolving election disputes to define what a legal vote is and to mandate a manual recount implementing that definition. The recount mechanisms implemented in response to the decisions of... |