Samizdata

A full recount of Ohio’s votes in the recent presidential election has been ordered by a federal court, following lobbying by the Libertarian and the Green presidential candidates. I have covered the story here. There is no way a full recount could be completed by December 13, when the Electoral College has to formally cast its votes.

It occurs to me that it is a very strange way of promoting the Libertarian message to waste $1.5 million of Ohio taxpayers’ money. The recount is not going to change the overall result and could only conceivably cause the Libertarian candidate to finish behind the Constitutional Party or the Greens finish behind a local independent.

The real purpose is exposed by Badnarik’s musings about TV exit polls. He appears to be the only person not taking medication in the US to believe that the exit polls were right (Kerry win) and the ballot counting wrong (Bush win). This beats Dan Rather anyday:

From what I can see, there’s no reason to believe the exit polls were wrong, and fairly good reasons to believe that it was the election process that was faulty.

I can see some benefit to the Democratic Party in all this. Without spending any money, or attracting the tag of “Sore Loserman” from the 2000 election, the Kerry camp gets all the benefit of the Libertarian and Green lawyers trying to put their guy in the White House.

I have been waiting for final results on the 2004 election at the county level before writing about them, but Brian beat me to it. The map at Freedom and Whisky is an early one with a number of ugly black holes for incomplete returns. Yesterday’s USAToday map is marked ‘final’ and has very little politicus incognito.

If you flip back and forth between the USAToday 2004 and 2000 Presidential election by county maps, you will see small but significant differences. The ‘Yankee’ vote is going more and more solidly Democrat. Counties north of New York City are becoming bedroom and retirement communities, a part of Greater Boston and Greater New York. New Hampshire in particular has been solidly colonized by New York City. Notice that almost all the State of New York went Republican and perhaps would have been carried by Bush but for the huge Democratic majority in New York City.

The rest of the country appears to show the Republican vote is growing in virtually all of the non-Urban counties. There is a significant decrease in blue-dominant areas in the non-New England States.

Also of interest is the Princeton map. While less dramatic, it is probably of more importance to an election campaign team as it shows much more clearly where the 2008 battle ground areas will be.

I would love to see this re-done as a pseudo-topographic map, and I’d love to see it for 2000 as well. That would give us a much improved view of long term trends. While blue usually does mean depth in such maps, that may annoy the more oversensitive amongst the bluish, so we will perhaps need both blue-deepest and red-deepest maps to avoid offending a victimized minority.

Just to cast a slightly different view in to the frenzy of commentaries here about the election in the USA…

Sorry but I cannot see how the election of George Bush, a big government right-statist, shows that the the so-called ‘right’ differs that much from the McGovern/Mondale/Kerry view in reality. Fetishizing the differences between the two, which is particularly strange when viewed from overseas, does not change the fact the underpinning meta-contexts are pretty similar when you add it all up. Sure, the Republicans will probably not do something idiotic like try to emulate Britain’s nightmarish socialist healthcare system whereas that is exactly what many in the Democratic party want… but how many government departments is Bush going to simply wind up in order to roll back the state? The argument between the two parties is how much to turn the ratchet of the state’s encroachment into civil society, not whether or not to actually turn the ratchet around to face the other way.

Economic and technological reality will eventually break the regulatory statism of both left and right: party politicos will follow, not lead that process, but please, just keep in mind the only real good thing about Dubya winning is that we get to give all manner of sanctamonius lefties an aneurism, and whilst taunting the collectivist left because the collectivist right won is indeed great fun, it is little more that a minor blood sport that will soon loose its appeal as Leviathan gets more corpulent by the day as both left and right shovel more severed bits of civil society into its maw… the defeat of the ghastly Kerry by the ever so slightly less ghastly Bush was hardly the victory of the forces of light over darkness.

You know, I generally hate to gloat but:

The mistake we all made was in getting our hopes up.

The only mistake you made?

Dismally, people asked each other how long they had stayed up the night before. “Until 4.30am,” said my friend Jim. “Long enough to start crying like a girl.”

The first email I received the following morning read: “Fucked off, dejected, our hopes have been blown to shit.”

Signed: G. Soros.

The next one read: “As REM once sang: ‘It’s the end of the world as we know it.’ Only unlike REM, I don’t feel fine.”

Such creativity. Such depth.

“There’s going to be a brain drain from this country which will leave the Red-State [Republican] morons to fend for themselves,” wrote an American on the Guardian talk-boards.

And spend their own money on themselves, to boot.

I rang my cousin in Chicago. “I’m good,” she said. “Well, no, actually, not great.” The hope thing had prospered there, too. “We thought we were going to win. Bruce Springsteen … the youth vote … ” She had to get off the line then; there were commiseration calls waiting.

It was Bruce on the line. He’s crying like a girl.

[Warning: obligatory ‘Bush is Hitler’ reference coming up]

“Ach,” says Oliver James, the clinical psychologist. “I was too depressed to even speak this morning. I thought of my late mother, who read Mein Kampf when it came out in the 1930s and thought, ‘Why doesn’t anyone see where this is leading?'”

Hmm..I recommend an intensive round of therapy.

There might be a feeling that a dirty bomb exploding in London is more likely to happen with the policies pursued by a Bush government.

Quite right. Just ask the Spanish.

This sense of powerlessness was also raised by American psychologists, who, anticipating high levels of disgruntlement among voters, were on standby yesterday to analyse the fallout.

And, today, they are being treated for depression, hysteria and suicidal tendencies.

“I am deeply ashamed to call myself American,” wrote another, while, “I’m ashamed to be English,” countered a third, in a competitive orgy of shame. Lots of people talked about powerlessness. “And that,” said one, ominously, “won’t lift until we get our own general election.”

And I bet John Kerry would still lose that one.

Naah, I was only kidding. I love to gloat really.