US elections need fixing, Bush okay, polls say

US elections need fixing, Bush okay, polls say
REUTERS

WASHINGTON, DEC 18: More than 80 per cent of Americans favor three major changes in the way elections are conducted following disputes in Florida that delayed deciding the Presidential winner for more than a month, according to a Washington Post/ABC News poll released late on Sunday.

A CBS poll released earlier showed that more Americans were satisfied with the outcome of the election -- won by Republican George W Bush -- than dissatisfied. Most would also welcome a large tax cut, which the President-elect made a central plank of his campaign but will possibly clash with Congress over, the poll showed.

In the Post/ABC poll of 807 people, 88 per cent of those questioned said they wanted a standard ballot design throughout the nation; 87 per cent favored one kind of voting-machine and 86 per cent wanted uniform recount standards set.

The US Supreme Court, which ultimately decided the election by reversing a decision by the Florida Supreme Court to allow hand recounts, received more favorable ratings than the news media that reported it.

The military led in confidence in the survey with 75 per cent. The US Supreme Court got a rating of 57 per cent and three out of four people did not trust the news media. TV channels created confusion on election night, reporting Bush won Florida only to retract the assertion.

Legal and political wrangling over whether machine counts accurately reflected voters' intentions in Florida dragged the election way into overtime until the US Supreme Court ruling.

Those polled also showed additional sympathy for Vice President Al Gore, whose concession speech proved more popular than his campaign. The Post/ABC poll showed that 66 per cent ``expressed a generally favorable opinion of him -- ironically the most of his career -- and 10 points better than Bush's favorability rating''.

Gore, who conceded last week after the Supreme Court struck down the Florida recounts he needed to try and overcome Bush's slim lead in the state. Bush was victorious with 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed to win.

The survey's 807 respondents were questioned by telephone last Thursday and Friday and the results have a margin of error of 3.5 per cent.

According to the CBS News poll, 50 per cent of the respondents reported being satisfied, while 45 per cent said they were not. In addition, 53 per cent said Bush legitimately won the election, while 40 per cent disagreed.

By a margin of 61 per cent to 28 per cent, those polled by CBS favored ``a five-year, $460 billion tax-cut''. On the question of public support for it, 42 per cent felt the President-elect, whose tax proposals face strong Democratic Opposition and Republican misgivings in Congress, would have enough support to pass the cut. Thirty-eight per cent felt he would not.

By a margin of more than two to one, respondents agreed with Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who wrote: ``We may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's Presidential election.'' Nearly half of those who voted for Bush agreed, the poll found.

The CBS News survey, conducted on December 14-16, among 1,040 adults nationwide, had a margin of error of three percentage points.