[imskylark]

"there is no evidence that Gore would have won the recount."

Didn't several different left wing groups do a recount after the fact trying to prove Gore won? It seems 5 or 6 recounts were done and each showed a Bush victory.

[SoothingDave]

Didn't several different left wing groups do a recount after the fact trying to prove Gore won? It seems 5 or 6 recounts were done and each showed a Bush victory.

Several major newspapers did do exhaustive recounts under several different "ballot mind reading" scenarios (discerning which chads were to be counted as valid votes). In all but one of them, Bush emerged victorious.

This story hit the news cycle on or about September 11, 2001.

SD

[Always Right]

Didn't several different left wing groups do a recount after the fact trying to prove Gore won?

There were some, but they had to be creative in the way ballots would be counted to do it. They basically came up with a counting method designed to make Gore win. Under the standard that Gore fought for, he would have lost. And that is what most legitimate news organizations tried to do.

[Choose Ye This Day]

Two well-known "right-wing" sources like the NY Times and CNN reported that Bush won:

New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html?ei=5070&en=59594c45b66eb9fa&ex=1064030400&pagewanted=print

November 12, 2001
Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote

By FORD FESSENDEN and JOHN M. BRODER

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals 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.

Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.

Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations...

---

http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2001/florida.ballots/stories/main.html

Florida recount study: Bush still wins

Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory



WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.
NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties' inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.

As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.
In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result -- that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics...

[bcsco]

"Didn't several different left wing groups do a recount after the fact trying to prove Gore won? It seems 5 or 6 recounts were done and each showed a Bush victory."

Several MSM newspapers were involved in recounts and each came up with figures that showed Bush winning Florida by a few hundred votes, as I recall.

[Purrcival]

And yet, the Lefties are claiming that the recounts showed that GORE won. Revisionist history at its finest.