it gets worse

[Leslie Goldstein]

I think the Bush/Baker line is that hand counting gives people an
opportunity to do things like shake loose the chads that would not count
in other precints, thereby giving Gore a higher percentage of the poorly
punched ballots then were counted for Bush. The B/B line is that these
are phantom votes in the sense that a machine would not count them (even
tho they were cast by live voters) and it is unfair to count them only
in the pro-Gore counties.  it does trouble me that they get counted only
in those counties rather than in the whole state.  I believe all the
voters votes shoudl get coutned and we should dump this outdated
amchinery while we are at it.
Leslie
Mark Tushnet wrote:
>
> I'm interested in the rhetoric of "stealing an election."  I would have
> thought, prior to this discussion, that a person stole an election when
> what I think of as phantom votes -- from dead people, from people voting
> twice -- were counted, or when votes that real people actually did cast
> were not counted.  The Gore side is claiming that this may be a
> situation of the latter sort, if the hand recount is not completed.  I
> take it that the Bush side's claim is that at least some of the votes
> that might be counted in the hand recounts would not be votes that real
> people actually did cast, because some of the discretionary decisions
> made in tabulating the votes will be phantom votes because the real
> person who cast the ballot really did not intend to vote for the person
> for whom the vote is tallied (or fraudulent ones, if someone punches or
> enlarges a hole that really wasn't there in the first place).  Given a
> process in which representatives of the parties can contest a particular
> vote, wouldn't one have to await the outcome of the hand recounts (and
> see what the margin was, relative to the number of contested individual
> votes) to be able to say that the Gore side stole the election in the
> relevant sense?