Audio of Jimmy Carter: Gore Won In 2000
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in Breaking News, Dumb Things Said By Smart People, Elections, HistoryRidiculous.
Listen, I think our election system is as such that we’ll never truly know who had the most votes in Florida in 2000. Did Bush win? I don’t know. Did Gore win? I don’t know. But Carter says he has “no doubt” that Gore was elected.
No doubt? Really?
Listen to him say it himself at Bareknuckle Politics.
This entry was posted on Thursday, September 22nd, 2005 and is filed under Breaking News, Dumb Things Said By Smart People, Elections, History. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
September 22nd, 2005 at 2:12 pm
On Montag’s thread about voter IDs, I’ve mentioned, half-jokingly, the infamous corruption of voting rolls in Philadelphia. If the Florida fight in 2000 had gone on much longer, you can bet each party would have expanded it to other states where their opposition squeaked out a victory by 1% of the votes or less. And I am sure Gore’s win in Pennslyvania would have been seriously challenged (a Democrat wins Pennsylvania by winning Philadelphia’s wards by enough votes to swamp the red rest of the state). I am willing to bet the Democratic margin of victory here would not have held up to close scrutiny.
Some more recent examples of the shenanigans here.
September 22nd, 2005 at 3:25 pm
Justin is right in at least one important sense - the results of Florida 2000 are unknowable because they are within the margin of error of the voting techniques and counting techniques employed.
Most elections are not close enough for highly accurate voting procedures to matter much. Even the tight PA 2000 presidential race that Callimachus talks about had Gore beating Bush by 204,000 votes (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html). Let’s just admit that, if you want to claim that fraud or incompetence swayed the outcome, that’s a huge margin that you’ve got to explain.
But even the best run elections are not going to be able to unquestionably establish a winner when the margin is a few hundred votes. There will always be imperfect balloting systems, procedures that were not correctly followed, ineligible voters who were allowed to vote, ambiguous votes that must be decided according to some rule, and on and on. Florida 2000 (and the Washington governor’s race 2004) were simply too close to unarguably decide given our present voting systems.
One might take the consolation that either candidate, in such a situation, is probably acceptable because half (to a good approximation) of the voters preferred him or her.
September 22nd, 2005 at 3:36 pm
“No doubt? Really?”
The insane never question themselves…
September 22nd, 2005 at 4:12 pm
As someone who does not live in the USA, I am mystified why the people of the USA are so complacent about such a shabby voting system.
Why do you allow the mechanics of voting to be administered by openly partisan Party apparatchiks (Florida 2000)? Why do you allow the counting to be done in secrecy, with no prospect of audit, by a private corporation that previously states which party they want to win (Diebold, Ohio, 2004)?
This is an aspect of the USA that genuinely puzzles me.
September 22nd, 2005 at 5:23 pm
Why do you allow the mechanics of voting to be administered by openly partisan Party apparatchiks (Florida 2000)? Why do you allow the counting to be done in secrecy, with no prospect of audit, by a private corporation that previously states which party they want to win (Diebold, Ohio, 2004)?
In part because blogs like this one ridicule anyone who makes a stink about it.
September 22nd, 2005 at 6:02 pm
I think you’ll find that the blogosphere is a big proponent of better voting methods and more transparency.
I voted for Gore in 2000 and was PISSED when he lost. I voted for Kerry in 2004 and wasn’t surprised when he lost.
Jimmy Carter could have talked about all sorts of things, but he chose to say he had “no doubt” that Gore won in 2000. And if you’re not laying at least some blame at his feet, then I fear your partisan leanings are blinding you to destructive nature of Carter’s words.
Basically, if you’re going to be THE point man Dems on this issue, what exactly is the point of saying something like that? To rile up the base? Well, considered them riled, along with the faithful on the other side.
Carter is not insane (and debsay, if you don’t have something valuable to add, don’t comment), but he exercised some bad judgement here.
And to Alan’s point.
Trust me, it puzzles me too and I hope it changes before the next election rolls around, but if Carter is going to come out swinging like this, it hurts those chances.
September 22nd, 2005 at 7:03 pm
Alan, what country do you live in and how is voting overseen there?
September 22nd, 2005 at 11:59 pm
Callimachus
I live in Australia. Please do not leap to the conclusion that I am a cheer-leader for our system: it has flaws. What I like about it is that elections are run by a government body, the Australian Electoral Commission. All the voting slips are identical (apart from names of candidates of course!) in every polling booth nation-wide. The slips are marked by hand and votes are counted by hand. Candidates can, and do, delegate people to observe the count at every polling booth. I do not remember a single incident of the AEC being suspected of fudging the count or of assisting any candidate.
Old tech? Yep.
Slow? We usually get a result within 2 - 3 hours.
Expensive? Don’t know, don’t care.
Trusted? Yep.
September 23rd, 2005 at 12:49 am
Knowing Cal, I don’t think he was jumping to any conclusions.
Personally, I like the “marked by hand” model. This is what Canada does, and they seem to have no problems either.
Just because we’re the U.S., we think we need to be in front of the curve of technology. But oftentimes technology fails us and we’re left wanting more.
Let’s hope we recognize this soon and adopt a more common sense system.
September 23rd, 2005 at 1:38 am
The question is, “Whatever does Jimmy Carter know about winning, anyway?”
September 23rd, 2005 at 4:00 am
The Australian system has many appealing qualities.
According to Wired News, the hand-couinting system sometimes gets it wrong, too.
According to this Slate article,
This, it seems, is partly a result of the “mandatory vote” laws, too. But I don’t think it represents an overall improvement, numerically, in the confusion of an American vote. Can you imagine the result of a like proportion of “spoiled ballots” in the 2000 election here?
I’m curious whether you think this is a matter of Walden O’Dell, chief executive of Diebold Inc., making a singularly inappropriate boast, in his role as a citizen involved in politics, or a case of an entire corporation, or important parts of it involving more than one employee, conspiring to throw the election by changing people’s votes.