"On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles led to the highly controversial 5–4 Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount."
What do you mean "all media called Gore the winner"? I can't find any evidence of that. According to Wikipedia [1], "on November 8 ... the networks declared that Bush had carried Florida and therefore been elected president. ... after all votes were counted, ... the networks retracted their declarations that Bush had won Florida and the presidency".
Also, note that Gore privately conceded the election that night, but retracted it after further counting due to the <1000 vote margin.
So in fact major networks (including CNN, ABC, FOX) initially called Bush the winner, but retracted that afterwards due to the possibility of a recount.
There are no ballots cast after election day. There are some received after election day, but none in PA, where those ballots aren't included in any counts.
Can you help me understand how we'd know if a ballot were cast after election day, if received after election day? I understand postmark is one such form of "signature of authenticity" (in a sense).
There are (generally) three ways to vote. In person, absentee via some form of ballot drop off, and absentee by mail.
In person and absentee ballots dropped off can be trivially found to be legitimate (timewise). You have them by 8PM or you don't.
For mail-in ballots, states have different rules. Some states allow ballots received by the 12th or later, as long as the postmark is on or before election day. Some states require ballots to be received by election day. PA is under a microscope because ballots postmarked by the 3rd, but received by the 6th may or may not be counted, pending court decisions.
Those ballots, however, are not included in current vote totals as reported by the state, so Biden won PA without those votes (and beyond the margin required for a recount). They'd just further extend his lead.
I flagged and downvoted your comment because it follows a disturbing pattern I have seen in messages from President Trump and his supporters, that the President cannot lose in a legitimate contest. The President has today asserted that he has won the election, "by a lot"; an assertion that can only be true if a significant number of votes against him are illegitimate. Mr. Trump has previously asserted that he won the 2016 election by a historically large margin, that the primaries and even the Emmys were rigged against him.
I'm tired of it.
Your comment is nothing more than an attempt to shut down discourse by denying that any opposed ideas can have any validity. That is a fallacy in an argument. In a democratically elected leader, or his followers, it is a direct attack on the foundations of the country. Please stop.
Barry Richard, an election lawyer who served as a lead attorney for President George W. Bush during the 2000 recount in Florida, criticized the campaign’s efforts. “I wouldn’t call it a strategy,” he said. “There isn’t any legal basis for anything I’ve seen so far.”
Other election law experts have questioned the multipronged attack. Richard Hasen, professor at UC Irvine School of Law and author of “Election Meltdown,” said the lawsuits, even if partially successful, were smaller-scale and didn’t threaten the results. “If they’re not being filed to change the election outcome, what’s the point?” he said.
He sued to stop counting legally cast ballots in states he was winning (PA,MI,WI) while suing other states to recount where he was loosing (AZ,GA, etc.).
It's both a contradictory argument and obviously illegal: you can't stop a state's election board from counting the already cast ballots.
Well they’re going to try to challenge lots of mail-in ballots that were either processed without poll watchers being able to see the signatures, or allegedly backdated by USPS, for a start. The first suit will be filed on Monday according to Giuliani. We’ll see how far it goes, but should be fun.
This is just announced today so I’m not sure how “experts” could have weighed in already, whatever that means.
They're going to get figuratively laughed out of court like have been so far. The handful of cases they have won are so non-controversial, they could have been equally brought by the Biden campaign, eg: observer distance in PA. These aren't serious people. They never have been, they never will be.
Yes, at one time Giuliani did good things. That was over 25 years ago. Giuliani is nothing more than a muckraker for Trump nowadays.
And yes that is a prediction. But it is an informed prediction. It is informed by the fact that so far, every case has been tossed for lack of evidence. I can go around making false assertions and filing false lawsuits all day too, it doesn't mean that anyone should take them seriously, and no one would. The only reason that we give these assertions oxygen is out of deference to the power these people hold.
Follow Up: The NY Post editorial board, one of the few boards that endorsed Trump has offered the following advice:
"Get Rudy Giuliani off TV."
Even the Post doesn't give Giuliani credence. Trump will get recounts, none of them will move the numbers in a meaningful way, just like every other recount in the history of Presidential recounts.
Fleccas is going to need to find *someone" who doesn't sell "bill+Hillary clinton pointing guns" t-shirts to independently check his work before he deserves anyone's attention.
The oldest known American was born in 1905. This list seems hit-or-miss, but I spot checked a few entries with birth years before that (excluding Jan 1900 since that might be used as NULL) and it showed them as having voted via absentee ballot. I don't know if the number is large enough to make any meaningful difference, but it's not a good look.
I've seen this explanation, but it's gaslighting. It says:
> No ballot for the 118-year-old Mr. Bradley was ever requested, received or counted.
Yet, the voter registration site clearly showed that a ballot was requested, sent to, and received from the elder Mr. Bradley. I'm skeptical that they would have detected the error had this particular case not gone viral. If they had the means to detect the error, then why didn't they do it before sending the ballot? Or, even better, remove the defunct registration in the first place?
Depends on how bad you consider the issue:
1) Ballot is sent to dead person -> not great, but I think this is apparently not illegal (and makes sense, since people don't die on schedules, and don't need to notify voter registration when they do)
2) Ballot also sent to alive person at same address with same name -> good
3) Living person fills out their ballot, turns it in -> good
4) Living person throws out dead person's ballot -> good
5) Vote counting accidentally records Living person's vote under Dead person's entry -> bad, but pretty easy to imagine as clerical error
6) Living person's entry never has a vote counted -> good (sort of, as living person's vote only gets counted once, just under wrong name
Result:
A) No change in voting results (living person's vote gets counted once)
But
B) Is this fraud? -> my opinion, no. There was no difference in vote count, likely no intention to make the mistake. If it was intentional fraud that's pretty useless
C) Is this system? -> Not sure, the list of thousands of 'possible dead people' certainly looks like worth investigating, but unless some real reports are gonna go look at every one I'm not sure there's gonna be a real answer for all of them
"If they had the means to detect the error" -> quite possibly because they're busy doing other things, like counting the votes. "skeptical that they would have detected the error" is pretty speculative, but again an error that results in no vote count difference is not the kind they should be correcting. They should focus on correcting errors that affect the vote count, right? (ie, execute the main thread rather than spend cycles garbage collecting. Garbage collect when the main thread is idle.)
The big difference is that 2000 revolved around a disputed recount, in a race with a margin of fewer than 1000 votes. There will be recounts in this race, but:
(1) There's no reason to believe they'll change the outcome much (recounts in 2016 didn't) --- states have learned since 2000 and have moved away from faulty ballot designs.
(2) The recounts will be occurring in multiple states, and Trump needs to sweep them.
(3) The margins in those recounts are much bigger than in 2000 --- tens of thousands of votes, not hundreds.
The biggest factor in Florida is that the ballot marking system that Florida used at that time was extremely prone to failure, especially with regards to machine reading of ballots (which itself could cause an apparent mark on the ballot!). This means that trying to divine whether or not a ballot recorded an intent to vote for a candidate can be subjective and depends on the exact standard you want to use, which Florida didn't specify (and the Florida Supreme Court ruled was ultimately too vague).
Since 2000, most states have switched to optical scan ballots as their paper records. These ballots have much lower error rates, closer to 1 error per million votes. I don't think there's been a single race using optical scan ballots where a recount actually caused a winner to switch.
Another thing that complicated this was that the way you punched the ballot resulted in the chad going into a waste bin. Those waste bins would fill up to the point where it would physically prevent you from being able to punch out your chad.
That election and SCOTUS ruling was a mess, and as a consequence did a lot of damage to this countries institutions.
It's more nuanced than that. Gore wanted some select counties recounted, bush wanted no counties recounted, but if there was going to be a rexound then bush wanted the whole state recounted. In the end the SCbrules that the 14th amendment said that including votes with "hanging Chad's" and other clear intent required the whole state to be recounted. Gore conceeded because there wasn't enough time and he believed that a whole state recount wouldn't have favored him in the end. History reflects that it may have been a bad strategy for Gore to try and recount just some counties because he may well have won if he argued for a state wide recount from the beginning.
Look at it logically. Bush was ahead by 537 votes. The court wrangling happened for so long and there were so many delays that it was impossible to do a recount in time for the legally mandated date of certification.
Biden is ahead here. Even if you remove PA or AZ, he'd still have enough electoral votes to win.
He's going to be President. The only person who doesn't get that at this point is Trump, and everyone around him is just bowing to his whims.
The Associated Press, who called the election this year, and who has been calling US elections since 1848, didn't call the election for either side in 2000:
"AP did not call the closely contested race in 2000 between George W. Bush and Al Gore – we stood behind our assessment that the margin in Florida made it too close to call."
The media also called Tilden over Hayes in 1876 and Dewey over Truman in the 1940s. Its almost as if they're not the ones to decide the winner of an election.
Having lived in 3 different cities let me tell you: they ain't got anything close to the same culture. Seattle, NY, and Atlanta are as disparate physically as culturally.
And the majority of Americans don't want a rural minority dictating the "fate of the country" either.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathanponciano/2020/11/04/the...
"On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles led to the highly controversial 5–4 Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount."
Can this happen again this time?