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On Dec. 8, 2000, supporters of Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush burst into cheers in the rotunda of the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee, Fla. They had just learned of a judge's ruling that absentee ballots cast in pro-Bush counties would not be thrown out. They taunted supporters of Democrat Al Gore with the song that baseball fans sing when an opposing pitcher is knocked out of the game. "Na-na-na-nah, hey hey, good-bye!" they chanted. Bush was pronounced the winner of the state of Florida, and the presidency, four days later, and the preservation of those "absentees" was a...

Some national media types are trying to make it sound like the Coleman-Franken recount sound like Florida 2000. It’s time to deflate that myth. The minute that public hears that someone has to determine voter intent, they first flash back to Florida’s butterfly ballots, then think of the punch cards ballots. While it’s natural to do that, that isn’t the case. In Florida 2000, people were debating voter intent based on the chad family (dimpled, pregnant or hanging.) Minnesota’s ballots are extremely straightforward. When determining voter intent, here’s some things to look for: 1) Did the voter fill in the...

Al Gore Warns That 2000 Could Repeat Itself @ 4:11 pm by Chris Good Former Vice President Al Gore today warned that Democrats could see another candidate fall just short of the White House if supporters do not work hard to push Barack Obama toward victory between now and Nov. 4 Gore sent an e-mail to MoveOn.org supporters this afternoon, urging them to volunteer for Obama's campaign and using 2000 as a cautionary tale. "Barack Obama is rising up to unite America behind his vision of progressive change. Yet we know from 2000 that progress is not inevitable. Victory can...

FOX News/Opinion Dynamics Poll. Latest: Dec. 12-13, 2001. N=900 registered voters nationwide. MoE ± 3. "Thinking ahead to the 2004 presidential elections, for whom do you think you would vote if the candidates were: [rotate] Republican George W. Bush or Democrat Al Gore?" 12/01 Bush 61% Gore 23% Someone Else 4% Not Sure 11% Won't Vote 1% Bloomberg News Poll conducted by Princeton Survey Research Associates. Latest: Dec. 4-9, 2001. N=1,200 adults nationwide. MoE ± 3. "Thinking ahead, suppose the 2004 presidential election were being held today. If you had to choose between George W. Bush, the Republican, or Al ...

Justice Antonin Scalia: Al Gore to blame for 2000 US election mess By Toby Harnden in Washington Last Updated: 6:35PM BST 26/06/2008 The 2000 presidential election debacle was the fault of Al Gore, who should have followed Richard Nixon's 1960 example and conceded without legal action, according to the Supreme Court's leading conservative judge. The 2000 election remains a source of discontent for Democrats "Richard Nixon, when he lost to [John F.] Kennedy thought that the election had been stolen in Chicago, which was very likely true with the system at the time," Justice Antonin Scalia told The Telegraph. "But...

For weeks now, we've heard a steady drumbeat--from Big Media, from Barack Obama and other Democrats, and now from HBO's "Recount"--that the Supreme Court handed George Bush Florida and the 2000 election, even though subsequent reviews show the recounts Al Gore requested would have increased Bush's margin of victory. Tom Shales, in Sunday's WaPo , has finally put into words the reason behind that: "If the mess in Florida had been resolved with as much skill and savvy as went into the making of the movie, the world might be a different place today -- presumably a better one...." In...

Reminder: Bush Won in Florida Recounts Conducted by the Media Photo of Brent Baker. By Brent Baker | May 25, 2008 - 19:56 ET With HBO's 'Recount' movie (airing Sunday and Monday night at 9 PM EDT/PDT) sure to rekindle claims that Al Gore would have won if only the U.S. Supreme Court had not “stopped the counting,” a reminder that both recounts conducted by major media outlets in 2001 determined George W. Bush would have won anyway. Two stars of the film have fueled the re-writing of history with actor Kevin Spacey, who plays Gore operative Ron Klain, charging...

For weeks now, we've heard a steady drumbeat--from Big Media, from Barack Obama and other Democrats, and now from HBO's "Recount"--that the Supreme Court handed George Bush Florida and the 2000 election, even though subsequent reviews show the recounts Al Gore requested would have increased Bush's margin of victory. Tom Shales, in today's WaPo, has finally put into words the reason behind that: "If the mess in Florida had been resolved with as much skill and savvy as went into the making of the movie, the world might be a different place today -- presumably a better one...." In the...

An early review is in for HBO's upcoming movie, Recount, about the Bush-Gore battle in Florida after 2000 election. Gillian Flynn in Entertainment Weekly, which like HBO is part of the Time-Warner family, has described the film, to premiere next Sunday night, as tilted against the Republican characters. In her review in the May 23 edition of the magazine, Flynn asserted: “Recount may not be downright blue, but it's not as purply as it wants to appear.” Saying “Recount is an underdog story, and thus a Democrat story,” Flynn reported that the “Republican players here are coolly calculating -- Tom...

Even as the MSM wing of the party warns fellow Democrats that the prolonged WWE-style grudge match between Barack Obama and the Clinton machine may tear the party apart...they may already have identified an issue they hope the party can coalesce around, like some sort of political superglue. Lesley Stahl’s 60 Minutes profile of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia spent an inordinate amount of time mis-stating facts about an eight-year old legal issue: “Of all the cases that have come before him on the court, Bush v. Gore may have been the most controversial. It has been reported that he...

Although former Vice President Al Gore won the Nobel Peace Prize this week for his work as a global-warming performance artist, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled early today that President George Bush would receive the gold medal, the diploma and the $750,000. Mr. Bush, who was narrowly defeated by Mr. Gore in the 2000 presidential election, thanked Justices John Roberts and Samuel Alito “for swinging the vote my way, and helping me to join the pantheon of great Nobel laureates like Jimmy Carter and the late Yassir Arafat who together brought peace to the middle east.” Mr. Gore could not...

West Palm Beach The Republican Party of Palm Beach County says 60 people appear to have voted illegally in both the Florida and New York elections last Nov. 7. Republican Party Chairman Sid Dinerstein believes voter fraud is there and that law enforcement should take their list of 60 people "and see who's doing what." But several people on the list contacted by the South Florida Sun-Sentinel said the Republican Party has it all wrong. "Impossible," said Shirley Goldberg, an 82-year-old Democrat who lives in Delray Beach. "I registered and voted in New York when I lived there. But I've...

Over the past few days, three Supreme Court justices defended their 2000 decision to overturn a ruling of the Florida Supreme Court to halt the recount of Florida's disputed election results, thus allowing George W. Bush to claim the state’s 25 electoral votes and victory in the presidential race, The Associated Press reports."A no-brainer! A state court deciding a federal constitutional issue about the presidential election? Of course you take the case," Justice Anthony Kennedy said in an interview published in the just-published book "Supreme Conflict," by ABC News correspondent Jan Crawford Greenburg.Retired Justice Sandra Day O'Connor told Greenburg that...

The sense of electoral victimhood among the Democrats is rapidly spreading from the kookie fringes like DUmmieland to the CENTER of the Democrat Party as evidenced by the recent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. WHINE in Rolling Stoned Magazine about how the 2004 election was stolen (by recycling already discredited fantasies). Even though the "proof" offered by Kennedy and others of the kook fringe is laughable, the professional Democrats now realize they need to accept such "stolen election" fantasies" in order to keep their hard core support among the loonie left. We had a hint of it earlier when Mama...

Like many Americans, I spent the evening of the 2004 election watching the returns on television and wondering how the exit polls, which predicted an overwhelming victory for John Kerry, had gotten it so wrong. By midnight, the official tallies showed a decisive lead for George Bush -- and the next day, lacking enough legal evidence to contest the results, Kerry conceded. Republicans derided anyone who expressed doubts about Bush's victory as nut cases in ''tinfoil hats,'' while the national media, with few exceptions, did little to question the validity of the election. The Washington Post immediately dismissed allegations of...

AL Gore bumped into Avenue magazine editorial director Pamela Gross the other day at the Regency, where she told him his daughter will be on the May cover. Karenna told Avenue that during the Florida recount in 2000, "the rancor was overwhelming at times . . . There was this horrible mob outside the vice president's house that was recruited by political operatives. They just kept yelling, 'Get out of [Dick] Cheney's house.' That was really painful and rude."

Palm Beach County, Fla., created the controversial "butterfly ballot" in the 2000 presidential election that reportedly confused more than 1,000 Gore-Lieberman voters such that they wound up marking their ballots for a minor-party candidate. In February 2006, local education officials told the Palm Beach Post that too many of the county's high school students apparently knew answers on the statewide comprehensive test but were incorrectly marking the answer sheets. The multiple choice questions require only one circle to be darkened on the sheet, but other questions require darkening digits of an actual numerical answer, apparently bewildering students into darkening too...

The Nation -- When the Senate Judiciary Committee begins questioning Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito this week, Americans will again be reminded of the limitations of the confirmation process for presidential picks to serve on the federal bench. Alito will lie to the committee, intentionally and repeatedly. In keeping with the standard set by all recent high court nominees, he will treat the hearings, and by extension the American people, who the confirmation process is intended to serve, with utter and complete contempt. Alito will be asked direct questions and he will claim that he cannot answer them for two...

New documents raise questions about news media’s findings on the 2000 presidential election Nov. 19 — After spending nearly $1 million, a consortium of big news organizations last week rendered what it once thought would be final word on last year’s bitterly contested Florida recount. THE DECISION: a split verdict. To the chagrin of Democratic partisans, the consortium proclaimed Bush still would have won the apparently limited statewide recount underway last December 9 even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not swooped in and stopped it. But if all disputed ballots had been manually counted—something, ironically, neither side had even ...

<p>Washington -- The real loser of the 2000 presidential election was hardball politics.</p> <p>George W. Bush thought he would lose the limited recount ordered by Florida's Supreme Court, so the Republican presidential candidate got the U.S. Supreme Court to stop it. The result was a victory in the Electoral College that gave Al Gore backers reason to question Bush's legitimacy.</p>