Mathematics Says Romney and Santorum Tied In Iowa 457
Hugh Pickens writes "Presidential candidate Mitt Romney received eight more votes than candidate Rick Santorum or 0.007 percent of the total number of caucus votes in the Iowa caucus, 'eking out a victory' on the path to winning the Republican nomination for president but experts in statistics say Romney and Santorum actually tied. 'From a statistical point of view, you can't say Romney won any more than you can say Santorum won,' says Charles Seife, a professor of journalism at New York University who studies election error. That's because in the Iowa caucus, where voters marked their choices with check marks or by writing the candidates' names in by hand, the error rate in counting the votes, which is also done by hand is orders of magnitude above the victory margin — around 0.5 to 1 percent. There are several sources of error that could easily render eight votes meaningless." (Read on for more.)
Hugh Pickens continues: "First, ballots sometimes stick to the bottom of ballot boxes when the boxes are overturned, and fail to be counted. Next, election officials occasionally misread messy handwriting, or tally their totals incorrectly. Finally officials can misjudge who a voter intended to vote for: 'You'd be surprised how often people place a check mark in an ambiguous place,' says Seife. Whether it's statistically significant or not, any official declaration of victory can have big ramifications. With political pundits regarding Romney's 'victory' as evidence that he's in a good position to win the Republican nomination, the failure to recognize a statistical tie in Iowa could impact the future of the country. 'It's Romney, not Santorum, who can head to New Hampshire claiming the win,' writes Nick Rizzo. 'But if you just counted the exact same votes all over again, there's a good chance the result would be different.'"
Delegates Won (Score:5, Informative)
Re:But no complaints about the count? (Score:5, Informative)
Because the results are not binding anyway, there's no need for a recount, or so the NYTimes says:
http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/04/no-need-for-recount-in-iowa-caucus/?scp=1&sq=iowa%20recount&st=cse [nytimes.com]
Re:But no complaints about the count? (Score:5, Informative)
It's because the caucus votes don't really count. There's two layers of delegates between the voters and the people who vote who actually count. By the end the delegate voters generally vote for whoever is "clearly" going to win the nomination in the national races. The vote that occurred recently in Iowa is just for the media.
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
Nonsense. The Supreme Court already told us that states don't actually have to count votes, so long as state statute says they don't.
Just don't make the mistake of thinking you live in a democracy. In democracies, they count all the votes.
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
The qualifier is only shown after the second moderation. So if somebody moderates troll, and afterwards you moderate underrated, your moderation causes the "troll" qualifier to show (but increases the score back to 2)
Re:Higher Power (Score:1, Informative)
Just don't make the mistake of thinking you live in a democracy.
The United States is not a democracy. It never has been and it never will be. It has always been a Republic. It's current form is a democratically elected republic.
No specifically for the presidency. The Constitution stipulates that the process by which each state makes the laws allocating their share of the electoral college, is left up for the states to decide.
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
Re:But no complaints about the count? (Score:2, Informative)
Or , perhaps Iow proportionally allocates delegates ( I have no idea) and therefore the difference is meaningless. From a publicity standpoint, the man who hate everyone could not have asked for a better outcome.
This. Iowa does proportionally allocate its delegates.
Because Romney was declared the winner, he will get 13 and Santorum will get 12. If Santorum demanded a recount and managed to reverse the win, he would get 13 and Romney would get 12. But to win the GOP nomination, you have to win 1,212 out of 2,424 delegates. So a recount for Santorum is pointless. The chances that one lone delegate will make the difference between winning and losing the nomination are effectively zero.
Re:But no complaints about the count? (Score:5, Informative)
Also, this year there is a proportional assignment of delegates based on the percent of vote received. Iowa has a total of 26 delegates, and 1,144 are needed to win the party nomination. At 1/26, there can be as much as 4% error in the vote and it shouldn't affect the delegate ratios.
CNN lists the following delegate votes [cnn.com]:
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Higher Power (Score:4, Informative)
You mean the Consumer Protection Bureau that Congress passed in to law in July of 2010? That one? The one that required a Presidential appointment to lead, but the House had been delaying on for years in hopes that they could nullify a law that a previous Congress had passed without actually, you know, repealing the law creating the bureau?
And bypassing Congress, like it says in the Constitution, Clause 3, Section 2, Article 2?
And Obama, the Senate Majority Leader during the Congressional sessions in 2007-2008? The same Congress that did recess and had Bush make the recess appointment of Jon Bolton as U.N. Ambassador?
Oh, except that Obama was never majority leader of either house of Congress and had no discretion on the calling of pro-forma sessions. Oopsy-diddle! My bad!
Re:Higher Power (Score:3, Informative)
Posting in a story from the same IP address you modded from will remove your mods. Whether the post is logged in or AC makes no difference.
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
no. The supreme court says that you can't continually recount votes until you get a result you like.
Bush won BOTH the original count, and the recount in Flordia. Both counts said he won. Nobody disputed that. What happened is Gore then asked for -another- recount (we're up to count #3 here) and the problem is he asked for a hand-recount, which wouldn't finish by the state-mandated deadline. The florida supreme court said "well we will just extend the deadline then." and the US supreme court said "uh, no, you can't randomly extend deadlines for recounts when we have two legitimate counts already in hand." because if gore had won that one, then Bush would have asked for a recount, or if gore had lost he probably would have asked for another one, and we'd still be waiting for results.
Stop parroting talking points. We're not talking about things that happened 400 years ago. These events happened within recent memory.
Re:Higher Power (Score:3, Informative)
"The same Congress that did recess and had Bush make the recess appointment of Jon Bolton as U.N. Ambassador?"
The US Senate was recessed when the Bolton appointment was made. The current US Senate is still in session according to the rules of the Senate and the law.
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, Gore only challenged and wanted recounts in the counties of major cities. That was his first mistake.
That, and the Florida constitution said all counties must submit their final count by the end of one week after the election. The state supreme court overrode that line of the constitution without giving a reason. So, that's where the US Supreme Court overturned it, after asking the state court again to give a justification, which they let lapse.
Re:Higher Power (Score:4, Informative)
Which SC?
Florida's partisan supreme court ruled that it didn't matter what the voting standards are. Counties can change the vote standards and count the votes as often as they like until they get the answer they want. I bet you would have a problem with this if it was a republican county.
The US supreme court disagreed. The first two times all the votes were counted (per the legal standards at the time) were the legal counts.
In hindsight the only possible thing that would have changed the outcome was to allow outright voter fraud. Which you are apparently for.
Re:Higher Power (Score:2, Informative)
Wow. Mod troll. Looks like I hit a sore spot : )
Parry with an A Gate [colbertnation.com] is a reference to Stephen Colbert poking fun at the fact that Republican straw polls (like the primaries) are not official events and therefore not subject to the same oversight rules.
In 2000 the US Supreme Court ordered Florida to stop counting votes and the results never were properly tallied (Even George W Bush signed legislation as Governor of Texas declaring hand recounts to be the preferred method to resolve discrepancies. Why his campaign went to the US Supreme court to interfere with Florida's decision to do the same is beyond me. So much for States' rights). I assumed this is what OP was referring to.
I'm sorry you find these facts to be so disturbing. Mod away.
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
The SCUSA said that it was acceptable that the state statutes did not require all the votes to be counted. That is my problem. The number of votes left uncounted, was larger than the margin between the candidates' tallies. Therefore, it was not possible to know who won the election. I don't mean that literally all the votes need to be counted, I mean that figuratively all the votes need to be counted, by which I mean enough votes to be sure of the winner. If the margin between the candidates is X, then Florida need to count all but X-1 votes. Florida did not meet that threshold, and therefore I reject its election statutes as un-Constitutional; the SCUSA should have done the same.
I don't know what you mean by voter fraud. The votes were there, on paper, in a warehouse. They should have been counted. And eventually they were counted, in their entirety, and the winner was not the person who was certified by the state. It is a 100% perfect example of why all the votes must be counted.
Re:Higher Power (Score:5, Informative)
What the newspapers* found is a bit more complicated than what you say. And amusing too.
If the recount that Gore had asked for, using his methodology, had gone forward, Bush would have extended his lead. So if SCOTUS had ruled the other way, Bush would have become president.
But, hold onto your hat, if the recount had gone forward, using Bush's methodology, Gore would have won by 3 votes.
And just to add to the confusion, if the recount had included discarded ballots from 2 counties, Gore would have won. The effect of ballots thrown out in other counties is unknown.
The net result? Who knows.
In 1960, under even more suspicious vote counting in Illinois, Nixon didn't demand the recount that historians say would have given him the White House. Shit happens. Some people are better at moving on.
* http://articles.cnn.com/2001-04-04/politics/florida.recount.01_1_ballots-without-presidential-votes-undercounted-ballots-miami-herald-and-usa?_s=PM:ALLPOLITICS [cnn.com]
Re:Higher Power (Score:4, Informative)
Republic - A country with the head of state as an elected position
Democracy - Two forms :
Direct Democracy : where everyone votes on every decision is impractical
Representative democracy : where you vote for a person to represent you
USA is a Republic with a Representative democracy
UK is a Monarchy with a Representative democracy
Ancient Greece was a Republic with Direct Democracy
Iran (strangely) is a Republic with a Representative democracy
Americans get confused by the party names Republican and Democrat ... perhaps they should change them ...
Re:Higher Power (Score:3, Informative)