Erm ... did I imagin the whole "let's count them again" shambles with the votes? I believe that Gore got more votes than Bush but he got in thanks to Cousin Jed's results. Whatever the reason, it was a close run thing and hardly "failed miserably". Hardly a massive endorsement for Bush
Bush Really Did Win
Phil Brennan, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Nov. 13, 2001
After months of huffing and puffing and spending a million bucks or so, a consortium of America's leading liberal news-slanting organizations have been forced to admit that George W. Bush really is the legitimate president of the United States. President Bush, it turns out, did indeed win the 2000 election in Florida.
That's what they were forced to admit after National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago examined all ballots that were initially rejected by voting machines. This included those that contained no discernible vote for president, known as "undervotes," and those that showed votes for more than one candidate, known as the "overvotes."
The (illegal) overvotes that could have provided the winning margin for Al Gore, the Post informs us, were on ballots where voters allegedly sought to be "extra clear" by filling in the oval next to a candidate and then also filling in the oval for "write-in" by writing the same candidate's name again. Automatically this legally nullified their votes.
NORC was hired by a consortium that included the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Associated Press, CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the Wall Street Journal and four Florida newspapers: the Orlando Sentinel, the Palm Beach Post, the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel and the St. Petersburg Times. Of all these, only the Journal is known as a conservative voice.
One imagines that the hoped-for result would show Gore the real winner in Florida and, therefore, the victor in the presidential election, and that he had been shamefully deprived of his victory by the Bush forces, including Gov. Jeb Bush, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris and the U.S. Supreme Court.
One further imagines the consternation around the editorial offices of the consortium's members when the study revealed … gasp … that "George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward," as the New York Times conceded Monday.
According to the study:
- If Florida's 67 counties had gone ahead with the hand recount of disputed ballots the Florida Supreme Court ordered Dec. 8, using the standards that election officials said they would have used, Bush would have won by 493 votes. Such a recount began the next day, but was stopped that afternoon when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that a recount using a variety of standards threatened "irreparable harm" to Bush.
- Bush would have won even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stepped in.
- There was no reason to count the clearly invalid votes of elderly Democrats in Palm Beach County who claimed after the election that, despite having been given sample ballots before the election, they were so confused by the Democrat-designed "butterfly ballot" that they might have voted for more than one candidate.
- Where Gore had the greatest opportunity to pick up votes was not in those undervote ballots his forces focused on, but in the approximately 114,000 (illegal) overvote ballots, particularly 25,000 overvote ballots read by optical scanning machines. Overvote ballots were those having votes for more than one presidential candidate – a no-no in any state for any election.
Reporting such results must have been painful around the Washington Post. It had to lead its story about the NORC study by proclaiming, "In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts – one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court – had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations."
But wait – that's not the whole story, the Post informed its readers. "An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins," the Post added.
It did not tell us what methods were employed to allow the bean counters to determine "voter intent" of those unable to follow simple instructions.
According to the Times, an examination of a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, suggested that "Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots."
But, the Times added, to get to that result "assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to 'count all the votes.'"
Again, eking out that elusive victory would have required that the votes be counted in the rather peculiar way the Gore forces demanded they be counted.
The Times and the Post admitted that the results show that even if Gore had been able to force recounts of undervotes in four Democrat-ruled counties – Miami-Dade, Broward, Palm Beach and Volusia – he still would have lost, although by 225 votes rather than 537.
For Gore to have won by the narrowest of margins, invalid votes would have to have been counted.
The bottom line, here, is conclusive: Bush won. Gore lost. Get over it.
As Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer put it: "The voters settled this election last fall, and the nation moved on a long time ago. The White House isn't focused on this; the voters aren't focused on it." The results, Fleischer added, were "superfluous."
Finally, one has to wonder if this patriotic consortium – which, in the words of the Post, wanted "to provide a historical record for one of the most remarkable presidential elections in U.S. history" – would have spent a million bucks and about 10 months combing over the election results if it had been Gore who had won by 537 votes and it was the Bush forces who were complaining the presidency had been stolen from them.
Get
"At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election."
http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/11/12/120247.shtml
