Al Gore needs to get himself a lottery ticket.
A man can be no more lucky in a recount than he has. As I heard several times on Wednesday, a recount shouldn't change more than a few dozen votes either way. "Experts" (please note that the word expert, will from now on always be seen in quotes after this election) thought that Al Gore hadn't a prayer in making up 1700+ votes in a recount. Human and machine errors have a 50/50 chance in going either way. For the election officials to err this much in Gore's favor should be highly suspect of something else going on.
A University of Las Vegas economics professor, Tom Carroll, decided to calculate the odds on this. Carroll, a registered democrat, computed the odds and stated that "The same person would have to be hit by lightning 30 times to compare with what we've seen in this recount." Those are some huge odds. If the odds of getting hit by lightning are one in a million, these odds are one in one million to the thirtieth power. Lottery ticket? Hell, this would be the same as winning the pick 6, the multistate, the pick 3, the pick 4, the pick 5, finding oil in your back yard, and discovering the cure for cancer all in the same day. Al Gore sure is lucky.
Several readers have emailed me a web-published theory on how theses odds can be countered by post punching thousands of ballots for Gore, thus canceling out any votes that weren't for Gore. The conspiratorial nature of such a thing required me to don a tinfoil cap to get through it all, although there are some facts which need to be considered.
Generally, a Presidential candidate in a closely contested race will draw votes roughly equal to the number of registered persons in their party. Because no party ever draws 100% of its own people to the polls, the number of independents and crossovers will bring your total close to the total number of registered Party members in that district. In Palm Beach County, Al Gore drew 98%. George Bush drew only 65%. George Bush drew close to 90% in the rest of the state. This does not have a reasonable explanation.
Further, it is highly unlikely that a Presidential candidate will be outdrawn by smaller races in the same district (this is due to the fact that many voters don't know the people running in these races and decide not to vote in that race). In Palm Beach County, Al Gore received roughly 47,000 more votes than the Democrat House candidates in the county. This includes a blowout victory by Bob Wexler. George Bush received about 5400 less votes than Republican candidates. This really raised an eyebrow.
Even if everything is on the up and up in Florida, it is no different there than anywhere else in this country. Yes, Florida is close, but so is Iowa, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Oregon. What happens in Gore's favor in Florida counties, can be countered in counties in other states. In order for me to accept the hand count in Florida counties, I must request that every county in the country be counted the same way. Otherwise this is an apples to oranges vote comparison.
I am coming to believe that Al Gore is going to use all means necessary to win this election. I thought this throughout the campaign. My feeling is he is going to keep counting votes until he wins. He's going to muddy the waters, confuse the issues and have the lawyers decide who our next President will be.
He is gonna try to steal it, and if he prevails, he will be forever known as the Commander in
Thief.
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