Quote:
Originally Posted by Shadow Minato
(Post 2126075)
There is one thing I don't understand about American elections. Haven't the election battle ended over a month ago, why are they still competing over senate seats?
|
What they're competing over is votes that are not 'clear'. Basically, a certain percentage of votes -- a very small percentage -- have problems with them in one way or another. Some of these problems are technicalities (voters are not allowed to write their name or any 'distinguishing mark' on a ballot in Minnesota, and doing so invalidates their vote), while others are genuinely hard to interpret.
This article gives some examples of disputed ballots.
There are other sources of irregularity, too -- errors in the counting, either mechanical or human-based. Ballots that somehow miss getting counted the first time or the other. Absentee ballots may take a while to arrive even if postmarked in time, or may get lost in the mail. And so forth.
These things only make up a very small percentage of the total vote... but there were
2.9 million votes cast in Minnesota on election day, so even a very small percentage of that is enough to swing a very close election -- for instance, this shift is less than 300 votes, which is just around 0.01 percent of the total votes cast (that's not one percent, that's
point zero one percent.) Even if only one in ten-thousand votes has a problem with it, that could influence the results.
On top of that, these problems are not necessarily evenly distributed over all voters. Often, there are only one or two
places with problems -- one incompetent poll worker or malfunctioning machine can cause a huge number of problems in their district, say. If that happens in a Democratic-leaning district, the 'corrections' in the recount will heavily favor Democrats; if it happens in a Republican-leaning district, the corrections will favor Republicans. And (perhaps because Democrats get more votes from extremely poor lower-class voters), it is more common for voter errors to be made by Democratic voters than Republicans.
Nobody is actually casting votes at this point. But no matter how good the system is, there are occasional glitches... and when the vote comes down to a point-zero-one-percent difference, those glitches can make a big difference. This was what happened to the general election in Florida in 2000, although it wasn't quite
this close, and in that case the Supreme Court eventually halted recounts...