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Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

What about the butterfly ballots? The errors those likely caused would not be randomly distributed.

The butteryfly ballot was an approved but confusing ballot that almost certainly cost Gore the election. But what is the remedy? There's no other choice but to have a better ballot next time. "The voters were confused by a legal and approved ballot" can't be the basis to overturn an election or it'll never end.

Another good example of this is how Alaska adopted ranked choice voting. In 2022, the 2 Republican candidates got more combined votes than the Democrat who ultimately won [1]. Do you think That was the intent of the voters? Almost certainly not but the electorate just didn't understand RCV and enough people only ranked 1.

In 2024 there was only a single Republican on the ballot so it wasn't an issue [2].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_United_States_House_of_Re...

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_United_States_House_of_Re...

Approval voting is the only workable RCV.

LOL, it's cardinal (rated) not ordinal (ranked), but yeah.

With a margin that small, there's a good chance that Bush won the election because his name came before Gore's. I bet there's more than 500 people in the electorate who simply pick the first name on the list.

What's hilarious to me is that states recognize that ordering of names on the ballot actually makes a difference at the margins, and most states have rules for how to do it: https://ballotpedia.org/Rules_on_ballot_order_and_party_labe.... For example, in 13 states the order of the names on the ballot is decided at random. Given that, it seems foolish to me to pretend that an election with a margin of 500 votes or so produced a discernible winner. I don't know how you fix that in a workable way.

When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).

The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?

But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.

> Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?

Whereas of course the Bush campaign was absolutely eager to ensure every vote, including those for Gore, were verified, right?

> The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.

I do agree with you on this, entirely. Although even if that was the plan, the state of Florida is not exactly known for making poll access easy.

> Whereas of course the Bush campaign

We're not talking about what the Bush campaign wanted. The point is that not even the Gore campaign argued that the double votes should be counted. So they're irrelevant.

They are irrelevant in the sense that there is no legal means to correct them.

They are relevant to the question of who did the voters actually wanted to win, which while not a legally relevant question is interesting. The statistical reports I've seen say that around 2000 of the Buchanan votes were very likely intended as Gore votes.

It’s pretty crazy you want to take a dig at the Bush campaign.

I once did an experiment on my FB where I described Gore’s selective recount scheme but attributed it to Trump. And people jumped up and down talking about how it was voter suppression and cheating. But when I revealed it was Gore, it was just hemming and hawing. These are all smart, college educated people too. Truly, there is no hope for the republic.

I remember the poll that asked Republican voters about their relative approval of “Obamacare” versus “an Affordable Care Act” and got a nearly 20% differential.

And then the number one Google search on the last Election Day? “Did Biden drop out?”

We truly have one of the least informed electorates in the world. And one of the worst for considering political parties as sports teams to be rewarded with loyalty at all costs.

Soon it will be: "keep your dirty government hands off my Obamacare."

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