Posted on 11/29/2015 7:09:17 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
An example of an extremely significant, decidedly unintended result of a relatively tiny event can be nightmarish. This one is, at least for me. It concerns the role I played in getting George W. Bush elected president in 2000. That I was the butterfly whose fluttering cascaded into Bush's election still pains me. I had written an op-ed for the New York Times titled "We're Measuring Bacteria with a Yardstick" in which I argued that the vote in Florida had been so close that the gross apparatus of the state's electoral system was incapable of discerning the difference between the candidates' vote totals. Given the problems with the hanging chads, the misleading ballots (in retrospect, aptly termed "butterfly ballots"), the missing and military ballots, a variety of other serious flaws and the six million votes cast, there really was no objective reality of the matter.
Later when the Florida Supreme Court weighed in, Chief Justice Charles T. Wells cited me in his dissent from the majority decision of the rest of his court to allow for a manual recount of the undervote in Florida. Summarizing the legal maneuverings, I simply note that in part because of Wells's dissent the ongoing recount was discontinued, the case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, and George Bush was (s)elected president.
Specifically, Judge Wells wrote, "I agree with a quote by John Allen Paulos, a professor of mathematics at Temple University, when he wrote that, 'the margin of error in this election is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins.' Further judicial process will not change this self-evident fact and will only result in confusion and disorder." (Incidentally, the CNN senior political analyst at the time, Jeff Greenfield, cited the quote in his book on the 2000 presidential election, "Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!," and wrote, "The single wisest word about Florida was delivered not by a pundit but by mathematician John Allen Paulos." I doubt, however, that Greenfield thought it was reason to stop the recount.)
I was surprised and flattered, I admit, by the judge but also very distressed that my words were used to support a position with which I disagreed. Vituperative e-mails I received didn't help. Many were angry that I would support Bush. Some were clearly demented. With all due respect to these correspondents and the esteemed judge, I believed and still believe that the statistical tie in the Florida election supported a conclusion opposite to the one Wells drew. The tie seemed to lend greater weight to the fact that Al Gore received almost half a million more popular votes nationally than did Bush. If anything, the dead heat in Florida could be seen as giving Gore's national plurality the status of a moral tiebreaker. At the very least the decision of the rest of the court to allow for a manual recount should have been honored since Florida's vote was pivotal in the Electoral College. Even flipping a commemorative Gore-Bush coin in the capitol in Tallahassee would have been justified since the vote totals were essentially indistinguishable.
Historical counterfactuals are always dubious undertakings, but I doubt very much that the United States would have gone to war in Iraq had Gore been president. I also think strong environmental legislation would have been pursued and implemented under him. Was I responsible for Bush's presidency? No, of course not; butterflies can't be held responsible for the unpredictable tsunamis that in retrospect can be traced to their fluttering and to a myriad of other intermediate events. Still, every once in a while, the guiltifying thought that the unwarranted Iraq War was my fault does occur to me.
It does if you are liberal. You have to be liberal to follow his thought process.
Write stupid things. Get an article published. Pick up a few extra bucks.
He failed to note that the recount only involved counties which were heavily dominated by the Dems and that any newly found votes would have statistically benefited only that party.
As a math teacher, shouldn't he learn how to do math first? Every single recount by every single media organization showed Bush won. There was no way in hell Gore won FloriDUH as a result.
That’s an insult to Art Garfunkel.
He gives himself way to much credit - like he was the sole decision maker? Sure, buddy.
I take this piece as a reflection of how liberals think. He lives with great guilt about the Bush presidency and dwells in the past. Conservatives work to preserve the future of our republic!
Really. Fighting a campaign over 15 years past. Cripes, don’t these people have lives to live? Guess not.
And when he'd say 'My #1 responsibility is to assure the security of the people of the United States', you didn't feel like doubling over in laughter.
So, it was a good thing ya done, there, boy... Don't be ashamed of it.
There was nothing wrong with those ballots. The controversy was created whole-cloth by Gore.
Just like the probability of Obama running the table of the swing states in 2012?
I am reposting a post of mine from October 2014.
So what happened in 2012?Colorado went 51%-47% for Obama. Denver alone voted 209,759 to 69,755. In a city the size of Denver (pop. 634,265), Romney could only manage less than 70,000 votes?
9 Electoral votes for Obama from a difference of 137,948 votes.
Florida went 50%-49% for Obama. A squeaker. The vote difference was 74,309. Think about all the polling irregularities we heard from Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach counties, with Republican poll-watchers being kicked out for two hours until the police forced Democrats to let them back in. The vote difference in those three counties alone was 574,033.
29 Electoral votes for Obama from a 74,309 vote difference.
Iowa went 52%-46% for Obama from a 91,927 vote difference. Johnson county had a difference of 26,534 votes, and Linn county had a difference of 20,601 votes. That's half of the state differential right there.
6 Electoral votes for Obama from a 91,927 vote difference.
Virginia went 51%-48% for Obama from a difference of 149,298 votes. Fairfax county had a difference of 87,049 votes. Prince William county had a difference of 28,790 votes. Newport News had a difference of 23,766 votes. Hampton county had a difference of 32,540 votes. These are the heavy blue counties, and they overwhelm the rest of the state.
13 Electoral votes for Obama from 149,298 votes.
Add Ohio's 18 electoral votes from a 166,214 vote difference that came from Cuyahoga county, and it's clear that the election was decided by 1,193,729 suspicious votes from targeted counties in targeted states.
A candidate only has to target a few precincts in a few states to swing an election. Gore came close to pulling it off too, with the Florida State Supreme Court's help.
-PJ
THAT ^^^ is hilarious!!
Borrowing :)
“........Sprinkling his discussion of numbers and probabilities with quirky stories and anecdotes, Paulos ranges freely over many aspects of modern life, from contested elections to sports stats, from stock scams and newspaper psychics to diet and medical claims, sex discrimination, insurance, lotteries, and drug testing. Readers of Innumeracy will be rewarded with scores of astonishing facts, a fistful of powerful ideas, and, most important, a clearer, more quantitative way of looking at their world.”
http://us.macmillan.com/innumeracy/johnallenpaulos
Even Mondale won his own state.......
But .. what this genius fails to report ..TA DA .. Just one year after the 2000 election, according to election laws, the NYT, WP, and all the other assorted and sundry radical left news publications pooled their money and went down to Florida and did a recount.
Remember this .. this is totally legal .. and they had every right to do it. However, it’s very expensive .. and thus the leftist media had to pay a high price to find out that Bush actually did win the election by 1500 votes, and not 537.
In order to do this procedure, you first have to pay for all the workers involved in doing the recount .. and the costs are extensive. First, you have to pay a fee to get the ballots released from custody. Then, you have to pay a fee to the police officers who will escort the ballots and guard over the ballots while they’re being re-counted. Next, you have to pay all the workers who do the re-count. Finally, when the counting is done, you have to pay for the police officers to return the ballots to the secured location.
THIS REQUIRES THOUSANDS AND THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS. And, this is why very few people ever do a recount.
A funny thing happened on the way to the recount .. when they were done .. it turned out that Bush had actually won by over 1500 votes .. not just 537. Proving that the LEFT had managed to STEAL roughly a THOUSAND VOTES.
But, did the left’s media make any comments about it ..?? I believe the only article that appeared in the WP(? or NYT) was about 3 lines long .. and it was buried at the bottom of a page well within the paper’s pages. Hopefully, nobody would see it.
TEN YEARS LATER, ON FOX - WITH HEMMER/KELLY, A RADICAL LEFTIST (Bob Beckel) BLURTED OUT THE FOLLOWING STATEMENT: “Bush stole the election”; which would explain why the left never exposed what they found in the recount.
I was so outraged; I could barely get through my work-day. When I got home, I sent a blistering message to FOX; letting them know that the public was well aware that Bush DID WIN the election .. and Bob Beckel was way out of line saying such a slanderous statement. I gave them all the stats that I knew .. and challenged them to stop telling such a lie.
I never heard anybody at FOX ever make the “Bush stole the election” statement again.
Sadly he sounds angry as in "fistful" and ironically, he did not present his work clearly because it was used to support another position. Sometimes we get "too smart for our britches" as the old man used to say.
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