Political & News Media Literacy: U.S. Presidential Election 2000: Who Holds the Power?

You are shocked (#2)

You wonder…by how many votes does a candidate win? Popular votes must be important. For example, students of voting age with a commitment to an issue can be marshaled to get other voters out if they believe they can influence an election. Another quick search on the last presidential election tells you the popular vote for Clinton and Dole. (2. Hint: subtract the loser's from the winner's total, of course!)

This question was fairly straightforward. Assuming your subtraction was right there was a difference of 8,203,602 votes.

Student A did a Google search on the highlighted words above and get an answer from a .gov (government) site:

http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/elecpop.htm

Student B got this information is from an online encyclopedia called Groliers:

http://gi.grolier.com/presidents/results/restable.html

Student C used an almanac called Information Please:

http://www.infoplease.com/

to get http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0781448.html

Challenge #2: Find the flaws in this Student D's solution.

Student D: "I went to webhelp.com and asked “what the results were from the 1996 election?” It gave me http://gpnj.org/results.html. This site gave me the popular vote for every candidate in the election. It showed that Clinton won 44,300,236 out of 90,233,790 votes in the 1996 election."