Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de wrote:
>
> Brian D Williams wrote:
>
> > I'm curious as to what you saw that was unfair about the election.
>
> An admission that a measurement has an error, and the realization that
> a measurement without an error bar wouldn't survive even a trace of
> peer scrutiny. That apart from the obvious cases of "candidate A won"
> or "candidate B won" or "candidate C won" there's also "within the
> error margins, we can't tell, so it's a tie", and a procedere for
> resolving such. As flipping an unbiased coin, or a public duel,
> or whatever.
>
> Apart from that, anything with a "democracy" somewhere in it is supposed
> to represent the meaning of majority of voters. Not representatives of
> such, or some d'Hondtian games with numbers. Not to open the can of
> worms of basis democracy vs. elitism...
a) we're not a democracy, we are a republic
b) we are not a democracy, we are a republic
c) we are not a democracy, we are a republic
Now, what did I miss?
Oh, yeah, simple majorities here can't:
change the constitution
override a veto
comdemn a man to death
declare martial law
change the law after the fact
and, elect a president and vice president
The Supreme Court satisfied the 'flipping the coin' part, by deciding
that Gore cheated by trying to change the coin to a two headed one in
mid-toss, so Bush won by default.
Now, I wouldn't have minded much if they had duelled, tho I 'spect that
Gore woulda demanded three people as seconds, bragged that he invented
duelling and thus gets to decide the rules AFTER having walked ten
paces, denied the referee had any controlling and legal authority,
Tipper would have demanded that videos of the duel carry warning labels,
Gore would have denied ever having smoked a barrel ('cept maybe once),
and the press would have declared Gore the winner before a shot was
fired.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:47 MDT