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Margin Of Duhhhh
By Matt Margolis | January 12, 2005
It seems like I constantly have to explain to liberals the differences betwen Ohio and Washington.
- Ohio: Bush won by rougly 119,000 votes. No evidence of fraud, tampering, or supression of votes has been found. John Kerry’s advisors and his lawyers who were on the ground agree and do not contest the results. Congressional Democrats also conceded that the results were surely not going to change—even as they contested the votes of the Ohio electors.
Washington: Gregoire’s alleged victory is 129 votes. Plenty of real evidence has been uncovered to indicate fraud and/or tampering occurred.
Yet, some peopel think there’s some hypocrisy that most sane people realize that Bush’s victory in Ohio was legitimate while Gregoire’s in Washington was not?
They just don’t get it. The margins of victory in these cases tell the story. 119,000 vs. 129. One of these is within the margin of fraud. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out which one.
I’ll break down the math.
Approximately 5.6 million people voted in Ohio in the Presidential Election of 2004, while approximately 2.8 million people voted in the Washington state gubernatorial election. While only twice as many people voted in the Ohio presidential election, Bush’s margin of victory in Ohio is over 90 times larger than Gregoire’s “victory” in Washington.
Why contest Washington and not Ohio? The answer to that is well within the margin of duhhhh….
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January 12th, 2005 at 9:28 am
All I’m asking for is sustained critical reflection. The lawsuits and other challenges in Ohio are not about overturning the vote or changing the winner, at least not as I see them. They are about investigating alleged problems and ensuring that everyone’s vote is counted equally and correctly. Conservatives are raising the same issues about the vote in Washington. The two issues are analytically equal, even if the desired outcome is different. I only want to see recognition of that fact.
January 12th, 2005 at 2:12 pm
Oh that’s right. You challenged Bush’s Florida 2000 legitimacy. At least you are consistant and not a hypocrite trying to twist facts to your own reality.
January 12th, 2005 at 2:47 pm
Ed,
after multiple recounts, and Dmeocrats trying to change the rules of the recounts how many more times were you going to do it before enough is enough.
Also, if you read John Fund’s book “Stealing Elections” you’ll learn that Democrats were most likely behind an enormous amount of fraud in that state during the 2000 election.
January 12th, 2005 at 4:14 pm
Ugh, so much speculation. If you’re taking the discrepencies in Washington as evidence of Fraud or Tampering, then there is MUCH more evidence in Ohio of the same. Some of it VERY similar to Washington. Meaning to me, it’s just as relevant. That particular type of evidence is only relevent enough to suggest things MUST change in our electoral system. I don’t think there was Fraud in Washington, at least not anymore provable or relevent than the similar issues in Ohio. However, besides the similar type of issues in Washington, there’s MORE things that happened in Ohio. The margins of victory mean nothing except that the discrepencies in Washington COULD be enough to change the vote, but they’ve gone through the process (Vote, Machine Recount, Manual Recount) by the law. So the discrepencies should be accepted as allowed by these laws.
“after multiple recounts, and Dmeocrats trying to change the rules of the recounts how many more times were you going to do it before enough is enough.”
I’ll field this for Ed if he doesn’t mind :-). Matt seems to implicate here that the Dems were behind MANY recounts. There were 2 recounts, one state mandated and having nothing to do with the Dems, the second paid for by the Dems (until the victory changed which by law gave the Dems the money back). Even the Repub Sec of State, who certified the election, has said over and over he’s seen no fraud. I’ll grant there were discrepencies, but probably no more than usual. It’s a sign of human imperfection and a broken electoral system. The former can be improved upon and the latter can be fixed. This is what EVERYONE should be pushing for everywhere in America so we can stop bickering over it and trust our elections.
January 12th, 2005 at 4:27 pm
Yes, 129 is a razor-thin margin indeed. Not unlike the, oh, 500ish vote margin for Bush in Florida in 2000. Rather than margin of fraud, however, I would call it margin of error. Voting processes are not infallible, and some votes will inevitibly be lost or miscounted. It doesn’t matter when the winner has a sufficient margin, which occurs in the vast majority of cases, but it is a weakness of our electoral system that we really don’t handle results that aren’t statistically signficant very well. Maybe whatever emerges from recounts is a sufficient tie-breaking mechanism. My personal feeling is that some threshold margin needs to be set based on the size of the turnout, and if a candidate can’t clear that, have procedures for holding runoff elections until someone has a clear victory. Of course, that would have meant a revote in Florida in 2000. Look at the bright side. The system bit your guy in Washington this year, it bit Gore in 2000 in Florida. The presidency for a governship isn’t such a bad swap, is it?
January 12th, 2005 at 4:52 pm
Ok, I didn’t want to bring up Florida 2000, but a quick clarification. Discrepencies didn’t bite Gore in 2000, the US Supreme Court did. They stopped the final recount, which was finished by multiple newspapers later that found Gore won in everyway you could count the votes. What’s the US Supreme Court doing stepping into a State matter anyway?
January 12th, 2005 at 4:54 pm
There is no basis to the claim that there was more widespread fraud in Ohio. For anyone to claim that there was more fraud in Ohio than Washington, and that the only fraud that there was in Ohio was beneficial to Bush is ridiculous. I have explained in a number of different blog entries that the conspiracy theories about Ohio are merely conspiracy theories that have been refuted and/or debunked.
January 12th, 2005 at 5:03 pm
But discrepencies did bite Gore, and Bush, for that matter. The vote was closer than the ability of the process to accurately count it. You could have held a thousand recounts and probably arrived at a thousand different victory margins, some for Bush, some for Gore, just because the counting process is not infallible and the vote was so very, very close. With millions of votes being cast, the final result is going to have some margin of error, almost certainly greater than a few hundred or a few thousand. We will never, ever know who won Washington state this year or Florida in 2000 (in the sense of knowing who got the most votes) because there is no way to count the votes with sufficient precision. FWIW, I don’t have a problem with Florida in 2000. My question is: how do you resolve an electoral tie? Which is what we have in both cases. Maybe just the luck of the draw in coming out on top in the recount is fine. A coin flip would be cheaper though, and about as accurate.
January 12th, 2005 at 5:11 pm
well, every recount that followed the election had Bush win Florida back in 2000..
electoral ties are decided by the House of Reps.
January 12th, 2005 at 5:20 pm
As I said, I don’t have a problem with Florida. But if you were to measure two people to determine who was taller, and the “true” difference was a thousandth of a inch, you’d be SOL using a ruler whose smallest unit of measure was a 64th of an inch, no?
January 12th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
randi, do you believe that Washington’s gov election was legit?
January 12th, 2005 at 6:08 pm
I haven’t followed it closely enough to comment. Off the top of my head, I’m skeptical that there would have been an unusual amount of fraud there, although that is possible. I would say that I hesitate to attribute to malice what can be attributed to poll worker mistakes, machine malfunctions, voter error and the like. Basically, I think the result could be within the margin of error. There were, I believe, approximately 2.75 million votes cast for governor. Let us assume several things. Firstly, that my math is not off (always a dangerous proposition), and secondly that Washington’s vote counting process is 99.9 percent accurate. Out of every thousand votes, one gets uncounted, overcounted, or assigned to the wrong candidate. Out of 2.75 million votes cast, that’s about 2,750 “lost” votes. You would like to see a victory margin greater than 2750 votes to feel confident about the result. Of course, if the process is 99.99 percent accurate, you only lose one vote in 10,000 and only need a 275-vote margin. So what is Washington’s accuracy rate? I don’t know, and in point of fact I would guess it lies somewhere between 99.9 and 99.99. But the point, convoluted as it is, is that it’s a mistake to assume a flawless vote-counting process. And the results from Washington, like the results in Florida, probably lie within the margin of error, making it impossible to ever say with certainity who got the most votes.
January 12th, 2005 at 6:13 pm
approx 2.8 million votes were cast in the gov election in WA. The margin of victory in Ohio is more than 90 times larger than the margin of victory in Washington, yet, only twice as many people voted. Proportionally, Bush’s margin of victory is much larger than Gregoire’s.
There may have been some funny business on both sides of the aisle in Ohio.. but not nearly enough to change the results. In Wasington, the margin of victory is small enough that the results could esaily be changed by the slightest amount of fraud.. and in WA, the Dems control the electoral process.
January 13th, 2005 at 9:55 am
My point is that whenever the normal “quick & dirty” machine tabulating procedures produce a resolution within the margin of error, a closely supervised manual recount that does it’s best to determine the “will of the voter” is required IF you believe in the principle of democracy. Throwing away someone’s vote is the equivalent of stripping them of their citizenship. Partisan political motivation in Florida was the single most persuasive example of the subversion of this principle in recent history. If the GOP had stood for democratic principles in 2000, I might be sympathetic to their complaints but if it’s win at any cost, the Democrats have to play by the same rules. You reap the crop you sow.
January 13th, 2005 at 3:30 pm
Margin Of Duhhhh (matt margolis)
Margin Of Duhhhh (matt margolis)
January 13th, 2005 at 4:20 pm
“There is no basis to the claim that there was more widespread fraud in Ohio.”
http://www.truthout.org/docs_05/010605Y.shtml
I think this is GOOD basis and PROOF of the issues in Ohio. If you want to disparage this and still insist Washington was worse, there’s no hope for your objectivity, it’s gone. If you want the whole 102 page document that sites specific laws broken, I can send that this way too. I’d really like to see the actual lawsuit filed by the GOP in Washington. All I’ve heard and seen so far is extreme hearsay (ie. SoundPolitics). I know Sam Reed has written a document for election reform in Washington and I agree with everything I’ve read of it so far. I’ll be, as much as I can, supporting election reform here in Washington.
“I have explained in a number of different blog entries that the conspiracy theories about Ohio are merely conspiracy theories that have been refuted and/or debunked”
No more debunked than Washington, much less so as far as I’m concerned. Just because it sound like “tin-foil hat brigade” stuff, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Look at Armstrong Williams? Dems, Lefts, whatever have been accused of being loony for saying the media is at least partially bought off. It’s been a BIG attack point for the Repubs for a long time. Well well well, what do we have here? I guess it WAS a matter of “Me thinks thou dost protest too much” or however it goes :).
“well, every recount that followed the election had Bush win Florida back in 2000″
No offical recounts were finished in Florida 2000. There were too many legal challenges. The US Supreme Court stopped the recount. The recount completed by the newspapers showed Gore won, but I don’t really even want to stay on that. It’s too far removed.
“If the GOP had stood for democratic principles in 2000, I might be sympathetic to their complaints but if it’s win at any cost, the Democrats have to play by the same rules. You reap the crop you sow.”
That’s right. I agree completely, but I also think the majority of both parties are just a bunch of politicians. Not leaders. We need leaders now.