*tOObiz on this election mess…

OK here goes…

This election is really a draw…if this were boxing we’d be hearing about Bush Gore II and everybody, including myself would pay to see it. How about letting these two cats just get in a ring and fight? Now that’s entertainment…and if you are peepin’ this George or Al, don’t front! I know you’d like the opportunity…Al you looked like you were ready to throw during the debates. George…you did look kind of scared.

Aight nuff…let me get serious for a minute. There was no legal precedent that could have been leveraged to bring about an expeditious conclusion to what happened on November 7 – the first true presidential draw in history. Since there was no precedent, or mathematical criteria by which a draw could be declared, we went back and forth trying to apply laws which are not specific enough to address the level of detail that is needed to make sense of all of this.

We needed a mathematical approach to this from day 1. There has been too much political rendering and partisan juxtaposing. "Fairness" has since election day, been expressed in political terms native to the interest of the person giving the opinion. Hence, it has almost been predictable what a person’s opinion about this is, once you know whether they are Democrat or Republican.

Here is the official tOObiz position on this fiasco and the proposed solution. I am NOT Monday morning quarterbacking…this position was firm on or about November 14, 2000 (one week after election day). Had this solution been implemented then, we’d be lookin’ at a president right now.

First of all, we can separate the country, state by state into two categories. One category is where the machine error factor can make a difference in who wins the state and the other where it doesn’t make a difference. The machine error factor really impacts those states where the difference between Gore and Bush is below 0.5%. There were only 5 states where this was the case: Oregon, New Mexico, Iowa, Wisconsin, and of course Florida.

There goes 90% of the country (45 out of 50 states) and that stupid political mumbo jumbo about "disenfranchisement" of American voters. If you don’t live in them 5 states…shut up – you been counted! Okay, now lets stay zoomed in on where the problem really is…now I said 0.5% before…but if you look closely, you’ll see that only New Mexico is the closest state to Florida where the margin of machine error could even come close to making a difference.
 
State                            Gore                                       Bush            diff       %diff
Texas
2429329
3796850
1367521
21.96405
Oregon
705410
700783
4627
0.329044
Florida
2910029
2910457
428
0.007353
Iowa
637049
632275
4774
0.376106
Wisconsin
1240418
1234999
5419
0.218913
New Mex
286578
286095
483
0.084341
New Ham
265853
273135
7282
1.35105

Lets look at this machine error factor using actual Florida data as a proxy. After a machine recount of 6 million votes, overseas balloting, and a manual recount of maybe 200,000 votes, Gore makes up about 900 votes. This accounts for about 0.0155% of the state. We see then that while in the case of Florida, the recounts CAN impact the margin of victory (the candidates are 0.0073 % apart), the probability that rectifying the machine error will affect the outcome of Oregon, Iowa, and Wisconsin is extremely small. I may also conjecture that again using Florida as a proxy, the chances that recounts in New Mexico would have made any difference are also small because the size of New Mexico’s populous is comparatively small.

THIS is why Bush decided not to recount in those other states. If a Brooklyn born sun of Jamaican, Analyst Engineer, Teaching, Evangelizing Gospel Rapper named tOObiz could figure this out, don’t you think Bush knew all that? But instead, we hear it like he’s the man who has America’s best interest at heart and who has decided that in the best interest of us, he will abstain from ordering a recount because he won’t stoop to that level…man, that’s four letta word material. At this point, let’s also chuck the argument that seeks to establish parity for Republican leaning counties simply because empirical data (above) led us into a Democratic field. The war is over Florida…any way you slice it. What is funny is that in Bush's zeal to use his denial of a recount as a political toy, his lawyers did not separate the difference between ordering a recount in other states (Iowa, Wisconsin) and ordering a recount in other Republican leaning counties in Florida. Bush SHOULD HAVE ordered the recount in other such counties and not doing so was in my guess, a political blunder.

Anyway, back to the mess…we see then that we truly are down to a county by county war over Florida. Now, let’s get this out right now. Dimpled ballots are stupid. Trying to ascertain the intent of a voter is stupid, whether its the law or not – people change their minds AND sometimes abstain from voting for president. Looking for a postmark on a ballot that came from Papa New Ginny is stupid – overseas ballots with no postmark need to be respected and counted. Moving on…the butterfly ballot sucked, I don’t care who designed it, approved it, used it or abused it. Again, data analysis wins…the use of that thing resulted in an error margin seven times as high as any other ballot in Florida. If further analysis were to prove that this ballot was seven times as erroneous as any other ballot in the country, this point would even be stronger. Either way, the users of that ballot in Palm Beach county have a good argument and should be allowed to revote, at whatever cost or impact to the final outcome. Note that I did not say the "ballot was unconstitutional." I don't know where they get these words from.  Let's just say "it sucked" and that we shouldn't uphold the results of sucky ballots.  Speaking of Palm Beach county, the canvassing board just didn’t get the job done and I don’t know what else to say about that. I know they were working hard but maybe not hard enough. They could have taken comp time after they got the job done. Instead they ate Turkey, stuffing, and Cranberry sauce and cost the Gore cause 188 votes. If those votes made the deadline, the differential would now be 349 instead of 537 and would be the closest margin since recounts began.

The best solution would have been a Florida runoff election – treating the Nader and Buchanan factors as neutral. I believe time prevented this possibility. Since the margin of victory for Bush was well within the tolerance of machine error, a revote of the entire State in lieu of a machine recount is what the law should state. The empirical data itself, should have been enough to tell us that a recount done in the error margin would yield inconclusive results. Laws that exist are much too antiquated to handle this problem and I believe the Florida supreme court was justified in using its discretion in overriding Mrs. Harris (curvy butt, tight skirt wearing…) opportunistic bid to enforce those laws to hook her boy Bush up. They aren’t rewriting the law as they go as they are accused of. Rather, they are applying judicial reasoning where the law as it exists today, simply cannot go.

The next best thing would have been manual recounts triggered immediately after the machine recounts in ALL counties where the margin of machine error could have affected who the winner is in that county. The other counties with decisive margins of victory should have been left alone and their machine recounts kept. If possible, a consistent method for hand counting should have been enforced by the State of Florida across the counties chosen for a closer look. Again, this method should NOT include dimpled ballots and determining intent. To finish this analysis I will need to see the tallies by county. This would tell me the size of the recounting effort and its feasibility within the timeframe. We needed to determine a number of votes that could be hand counted within the time frame (e.g. up to December 12??). If the number of counties that were close amounted to more votes than could be counted in the time, we needed to have something like the NBA draft lottery where we ensure that the number of red and blue counties is equivalent but the actual county is chosen at random. Once we had the number of votes that could be hand counted in the time frame allocated across red and blue counties, the manual recounts would have been done. After these counts, a fair process will have determined the best Florida tally given the circumstances and the 43rd president.

God Bless America,

tOObiz
President of my Household
…what?

Maybe them two cats should battle it out as rappers, huh?  http://www.jibjab.com