Gore won 2000 Florida election by 77,000 votes

Here’s how to estimate the effect of spoilage on the election outcome. For fun, let’s take Florida 2000. We know from comparison of census tracts to precincts that 54% of the 179,855 ballots “spoiled” were cast by African-American voters, that is, 97,000 of the total.

Every poll put the Black vote in Florida for Al Gore at over 90%. Reasonably assuming “spoiled” ballots matched the typical racial preferences, Gore lost more than 87,000 votes in the spoilage pile. Less than 10% of the African-American population voted for Mr. Bush, i.e. Bush lost no more than 10,000 votes to spoilage. The net effect: Gore had a plurality of at least 77,000 within the uncounted ballots cast by Black citizens.

OK, then, what about “Non-Black” voters, whose votes made up the remaining 46% of the spoilage pile? Well, frankly, you can ignore these, as these voters split their vote somewhat evenly between Gore and Bush. Sticklers wanting a closer exam would note that Gore probably won a majority of these votes as well. Moreover, the only large group of spoiled votes in a wealthy white county occurred in Palm Beach (due to “butterfly” ballots), a rare, rich white group of strongly Democratic voters.

Now you can dazzle your Republican friends with the real vote count — Gore won Florida by 77,000 in 2000. But they figure you already spend too much time concerned about issues like democracy and too little time concerned about guns and tax cuts.

[edit on 11-3-2007 by golddragnet]

So basically you're saying that we should take an anonymous ballot that was marked incorrectly (voting for more than one person for president or voting for no one for president), assume that the person who filled out the ballot is probably black (because I guess you think blacks are much more likely to be too stupid to vote correctly than whites), then automatically put these non-votes into the Democratic column (since most blacks are living on the Democrat plantation).

Yeah, right...that's real democracy in action

[edit on 3/11/2007 by djohnsto77]

No, I am not saying that at all, why did you try to over-simplify the issue, and why the insinuation of racism against Black people, that was totally uncalled for.

I already gave my reasons for counting the so-called "spoilage".

www.mylinkspage.com...

[edit on 11-3-2007 by golddragnet]

So, what about all the people in north Florida (in the panhandle) who were on their way to vote but then turned around and went home after hearing on the news that the polls in Florida had closed and the state was called for Gore? The problem was, these people were in the Central timezone and the polls were still open. The people in this area voted overwhelmingly for Bush.

Should we count every registered voter in Florida's central timezone that didn't vote as a vote for Bush?

Originally posted by golddragnet
No, I am not saying that at all, why did you try to over-simplify the issue, and why the insinuation of racism against Black people, that was totally uncalled for.

I already gave my reasons for counting the so-called "spoilage".

No you didn't. Since balloting is anonymous, it's impossible to give accurate statistics as to how many black vs. white people spoil their ballot. While you may be able to correlate precincts that tend to have more blacks to those who tend to have more spoiled ballots, you could also say that areas that tend to be more black, tend to also have plenty of whites who are lower the socioeconmical scale than whites from precincts with a higher percentage of whites. So no sure causation can be made between blacks and spoiled ballots. It's likely more due to socioeconomic status than skin color.

Plenty, plenty of poor southern whites vote Republican.

www.mylinkspage.com...

What does Israel have to do with this?

Well Kennedy stole the election from Nixon in '60. So I guess that makes us even!

Anyway, if your statistics about "90% of blacks" voting for Gore were accurate then we wouldn't even need to have elections. We could just use golddragnet's voting mathematics to figure out who would have won the election, based soley on the race and location of the voters. It'd save us MILLIONS, probably BILLIONS in election funds! Maybe we should vote on that... On second thought, we don't have to vote on it because you already know how we will all vote!

I'm in my mid 20's, unmarried and white. I live in a democratic-controlled county in southern New Jersey. So you should be able to tell me within a statistical certainty who I voted for, right?

Anyway, your theory is flawed because the people counting the votes can't tell which race each voter is. The fact is that I don't want people who don't have the intelligence to use a simple ballot to be deciding our next Commander-in-Chief anyway.

for god's sake it was 7 years ago! we should care why? it's not old news it not news at all, just sour grapes, let it go and work for the next election that is the one that counts.