The Ohio Recount: The Stealth Recount

[kuozzman]

http://www.elitestv.com/pub/2004/Dec/EEN41c7071285fd1.html
(Entire Article)
'Recount? What recount? Are you talking about the new election in the Ukraine?' If you ask the average person on Main Street, USA about 'The Recount', that is the answer you are likely to get, if the person is even aware of the Ukraine election turmoil. If you then follow-up with asking them if they know about the Ohio recount, they will probably ask you what is being recounted. Such is the situation with the press' reporting of this important concluding event in the US Presidential election.

To be sure, Senator John Kerry has already conceded, and the Electoral College has voted. But a concession has no constitutional consequences; you will find no language in the constitution or any amendments that talk about a concession having any meaning in the progress of a Presidential election. The electoral college vote is, of course, all important, but the recount still could affect its outcome, although the process by which that would happen if the Ohio tally changes is up for debate.

The ongoing Ohio recount is unknown to most citizens and academic to most pundits. To be sure, if we just add the over-votes, under-votes and other known election anomalies in Ohio, we do not find enough potential ballots such that if Kerry won all of them (that in and of itself a statistical near-impossibility with worse odds than an individual winning a seven figure lottery) he would win. Kerry's only chance of winning Ohio is if one or more cataclysmic errors are found, or if evidence is found of massive and systemic fraud. Even though the chances of these are slight, a recount could conceivably uncover such things so the lack of coverage in the mainstream press is surprising. A Presidential Election only occurs once every four years, a result so close that follow-up action with any possibility of affecting the election has only occurred twice in the last hundred or so years. Even if the Ohio recount doesn’t end up changing much other than the vote of a few dozen ballots, isn't it worth a little more of a look by the press than it is getting? Are other front page stories really that much more important?

[bemis12]

1. If there were.......

any realistic reason to think they'd find "cataclysmic errors" or "systemic fraud", it would be reported from everywhere.

As it is, they aren't going to find any of those things, and pretty much everyone outside the DU world knows it. That's why it's being ignored- it's a non-event.

[TacticalPeek]

2. "worse odds than an individual winning a seven figure lottery"

And that happens several times a year, in the US alone.