more on A nation (evenly) divided

Begin forwarded message:

From: Einar Stefferud <stef@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: August 29, 2004 2:21:47 AM EDT
To: David Farber <dave@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: [IP] A nation (evenly) divided

As I understand the Electoral College, the founders of our nation were 
aware of
the possibility of tie votes and set the Electoral Collage to make a 
decision
so as to avoid our government from collapse in the face of an 
indeterminate vote.

The simple fact is that even with perfect voting systems is is possible 
to
encounter a real tie vote, in which case the election is equivalent to a
flipped coin that landed and stood on its edge.  Highly improbably but 
not
provably impossible, so the means of resolving the election in an 
uncontested
way, must be provided in the constitution.

And so it is, as I read the constitution and the Electoral Collage 
rules.

As I see it, at worst, the Electoral Collage will essentially flip a 
coin and
declare the outcome to be the decision.  So we will not ever be without 
a
resident!

I do not see how a solution can be found in any other way, when the 
vote is
so close as to be indistinguishable from a dead tie.  The whole 
elaborate
structure of the Electoral Collage is primarily designed to prevent a
significantly serious deadlock.

All this is good as I see it, regardless of all the mumbling hordes that
rant on and on about how Bush Stole the election in 2000.

The other side of that argument is that Gore was trying his best to 
solve the problem by meddling with he counting process with new "after 
the fact" "laws"
enacted after the voting was completed in an effort to count votes 
until Gore's
team found enough new votes to tilt the election results by some small 
margin
that would be big enough to claim that Gore Won.

Thankfully, the Electoral College saved the day, with the Supreme Court 
finding
that continued counting with partisans finding new votes on some large 
enough
scale would very likely lead to a really serious deadlock and crisis.

So I vote to retain the Electoral College until something provably 
better is
discovered;-)...  And I would not argue against efforts to further 
educate our
voting citizens to understand what all this confusion is about.

Cheers...\Stef

> Begin forwarded message:
>
> From: Tim Onosko <tim@xxxxxxxxxx>
> Date: August 28, 2004 1:04:29 AM EDT
> To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
> Subject: A nation (evenly) divided
>
> Dear Dave Farber:
>
> I think  the great undiscussed issue is what to do with an election 
> that ends in a statistical dead heat, and it is one for which there is 
> obviously no Constitutional solution.  As Americans, the value of our 
> votes is established by the admonition that a candidate can win or 
> lose by a single vote: ours.  This is true, no doubt, in a race of 
> limited scope, such as a local election.  But, on a national scale, it 
> is always possible, as we saw in November 2000, to be cast into a 
> situation like Florida, where no number of recounts may have ever 
> yielded a satisfactory answer to who actually won the state.  The 
> different ways recounts were ordered, the rules by which they were 
> conducted, human error and the chaotic environment itself were likely 
> to have meant that no two recounts would have been the same.  Anyone 
> who has taken the most rudimentary statistics course recognizes this 
> as the margin of error.
>
> The U.S. Constitution makes no mention of how to solve such disputes, 
> and so we were thrown into the worst kind of court case possible, 
> where there was no precedent and precious little case law, and where 
> the outcome was assured to be determined by lawyers, not the law.  
> Yet, considering all of the public furor over the 2000 election, there 
> has been virtually no discussion about the underlying cause of the 
> problem or how to settle it if it happens again.  Instead, we simply 
> address the voting methods -- punch cards and hanging chads are out, 
> optical ballots and e-voting are in.  But there remains a margin of 
> error in every virtually voting and accounting method, and there is 
> still no Constitutional remedy for the statistical dead heat.
>
> With polls that reflect a still a frighteningly evenly divided nation, 
> the possibility exists that some variant of the 2000 scenario might 
> once again play itself out without any better legal method of settling 
> matters.  We don't need to live through this nightmare again, where 
> half the electorate inevitably feels disenfranchised for the next four 
> years.
>
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