Posted on 02/26/2004 4:07:35 AM PST by HankReardon
Great analysis,
Some of my thoughts:
Up to 3 days before the election Rasmussen and Portrait of America had GWB up to 9 points ahead. After the Maine DWI fiasco it shrank, but this is interesting. PoA (or Rasmussen) went back and re-sampled there pool after the election and came out 46 44 for Bush. Think about it, in a race of 100 million votes, a percentage point is a million votes, so how did they scam 2 million plus?
In terms of other irregularities do not forget the Students in Wisconsin, and the "Snowbird" double voters in FLA that also voted in NY, NJ, etc. Also living in Metro Detroit area, Detroit had a 95% turn out hmmmm... way above the national average.
Mary Matalin on Imus a few days after the election I think tipped GWB's Teams Hat and NO ONE CAUGHT IT, BUT I DID, she said they planned for an Electoral win. Now I do not want to read to much spin into that or put on a tinfoil hat, but did they suspect they were going to try to skunk them and they planned for it?
In the grand scheme of things, cheaters never prosper, they (Gore and Company) blew it by 600 votes. Post 9-11, I can't help but wonder if GWB's victory wasn't somehow helped via the "Almighty". My gosh were would we be with AL Gore now?
Post 9-11 I hope and I remain optimistic that no irregularities will occur for the ballots cast by our brave men and women in uniform for 2004, we cannot have what happened to them in 2000 repeated.
THE ONE PARAGRAPH SUMMARY
1. Florida was excruciatingly close. Both sides have all kinds of “coulda should wouldas” that should all be disregarded.
2. By any reasonable measure of the pre-existing rules for casting and counting ballots, Bush got more legal votes that got into the ballot boxes in Florida.
3. It is quite probable that more people left the voting booths in Florida thinking that they had voted for Gore, but that doesn’t matter.
I will post the long version with support for each of these points shortly
THE ONE PARAGRAPH SUMMARY
1. Florida was excruciatingly close. Both sides have all kinds of “coulda should wouldas” that should all be disregarded.
2. By any reasonable measure of the pre-existing rules for casting and counting ballots, Bush got more legal votes that got into the ballot boxes in Florida.
3. It is quite probable that more people left the voting booths in Florida thinking that they had voted for Gore, but that doesn’t matter.
THE EXPANSION OF THESE POINTS
With an official difference of 537 votes out of over 6 million (.009%), This was probably the closest state result in presidential election history (possible exception, a 4-vote difference in Maryland in 1832!). Even if the margin had been 5,000 votes, it still would have been the closest in the previous 80 years, and the closest ever in a state that could be decisive. Thus, every decision, by officials, media, and politcians, could be decisive. Just as when you lose in the bottom of the 9th in the 7th game of the world series, everything is crucial. But, that’s life -- you can’t go back and replay it. Examples: The voting lists are available to both sides, for examining and challenging in advance. Both sides can challenge, and both sides can make mistakes. After the fact, the GOP found some people double registered in New York and Florida, who voted in both places -- most of them were probably democrats. After the fact, we know some people were purged who weren’t really felons -- most of them were probably Democrats. But other felons who should have been purged weren’t. And so on -- you can try to estimate who came out ahead, but it doesn’t matter -- that’s the rules.
The ballot format (see below) worked out to the dem’s disadvantage in Palm Beach and Duval Counties. But the formt was known and anyone could challenge it. That’s the rules.
The early media call may have discouraged a few people (but not many -- see below), but the rules say you have to go and vote, if you want it to count. Any GOP ers who failed to vote in the last 10 minutes because of listening to the TV (radio?) are just as dumb (or more so!) as the Dems who couldn’t figure out the ballot. So, all the “coulda shouldas” are disregarded.
2. The final 537-vote official figure is probably the best count of the votes that went into the box, as counted in the official way, by the local counting boards. As discussed below, you can nitpick what happened in a number of individual counties but, on balance, the counting was done by the local folks, in a mostly fair way, with a bit of a bias toward the Gore side, and some possible arguments at every step of the way. Katherine Harris, with one exception, did not count any votes, discount any votes, or force any of the local folks to make any decisions. The one exception is the failure to count the hand recount in Palm Beach, which would have added 174 votes for Gore. These are the votes that Palm Beach sent in too late, based on the Florida Supreme Court first recount order. This is probably the most questionable result from a fundamental fairness point of view, but it would not have changed the final result; it was based solidly on the Supreme Court of Florida order; and Palm Beach could have either finished earlier, or just sent in their almost-final totals (they finished about 2 hours later), and let that be litigated. In any event, that quarrel, alone, would not change the result.
THE FIRST RECOUNT .
Many people have complained about the first recount, which lowered Bush’s margin from 1784 to 300. However, most of that change is attributable to 2 clear cases where the first count was in error. In Broward, one precinct, 029E, was not counted. You can see that in the precinct totals put out election night. That precinct went for Gore by over 300 votes, but based on the makeup of the precinct, that is not unusual. In Pinellas county, some ballots were double counted and others left uncounted. When this was corrected, it led to a gain of about 400 for Gore, and also brought the final returns into line with the number of votes cst in those precincts. Also, in Nassau county, the recount took away about 100 votes from Bush, but that was an error that was introduced in the recount, and was later corrected and reversed, giving the votes back to Bush, before the final official tally. Those three adjustments account for most of the Gore gain. The other changes are mostly unexceptionable, but two should be noted -- Gadsden County -- very pro Gore -- the recount gave Gore an additional 170 votes, mostly from “finding intent” in some disputed undervote ballots. The GOP made no special objection ot this at the time, and it was the sort of recount that could have been done in any county. In Volusia, a much larger county, about 187 votes were gained from a complete recount. In Broward, the full machine recount only changed the result by about 20 votes, while Palm Beach changed by 200. This one is unexplained. Individual county quarrels. In Broward, Dade, and Palm Beach, there were complete or partial re-counts of all the ballots. Several themes emerge. a) In general, whoever was ahead gained votes, in very rough terms proportional to how well they did in the precinct, and to how many undervotes there were. When anything is done 1.5 million times (the number of votes in the 3 counties), some mistakes are going to happen. There undoubtedly were some legitimate errors corrected and additions made. Particularly in Broward and Palm Beach, there was also a fair amount of political finagling . Examples. In Broward, the 3 “Ballot commisioners” disagreed on 19% of the “disputed” ballots put before them. When there was a split, it ws virtually always between Rosenberg (the GOP Judge) and Gunzberger (the Dem Commissioner), with Lee ( the Dem Judge and Chairman) as the deciding vote. He split close to 50-50 in the cases where the other two tied. Even if Rosenberg alone had voted, Gore would have gained some votes. If Gunzberger’s vote had always controlled, Gore would have gained enought votes to have taken the lead!! Thus, in a sense, it was not the Supreme Court who made Bush President, it was Judge Lee, and Judge Burton in Palm Beach (see below), by refusing to give Gore any greater number of votes in the recount.
Military votes. Despite charges and counter charges, the number of military ballots sent out, the number received, and the percentage ruled valid, was generally in line with past elections, in number and in pattern. Dems claimed that too many were accepted, despite defects, and GOPs claimed that too many were blocked by dem challenges for illegitimate reasons. Again, each challenge and vote was determined by local boards, there is some evidence that the lenience of accepting votes was related to the politcal tenor of the board, but each outcome could have been challenged further, and they were not, with the exception of a GOP federal suit that added a few (c. 20) votes, and might have added a few more if pressed to the ultimate.
Some charges on the net about claims of Dems gang punching Gore in thousands of cards, in order to either (a) produce double-punches and thus over-votes to cancel Bush ballots, or (b) creating Gore votes out of people who left the ballot completely blank. However, if there were any truth to this, it should have produced a pattern of zero or suspiciously LOW undervotes in some precincts, because by hypothesis, this scheme would have meant that there would be no under votes; or, literally no Bush votes, as all would have been cancelled. There is no such pattern, from an examination of precinct returns. So unless you believe that the scheme was so massive and diabolical that the perpetrators managed to get their hands on exactly, say, 20% of the votes in every precinct, or some such, it just doesn’t fit the facts. Tinfoil territory.
Suppresion of Black votes, or huge increase in black votes. Neither happened. The fraction of black voters was very much in line with past elections. Florida registers by Race, and the sec state office published exact figures showing the number of registered voters of each race that voted. Black turnout as a percentage of registered voters was slightly less than the average for all voters, and in line with past elections. Reports that “900,000 blacks voted, increasing to 15% of the electorate up from 10% in 1996” are simply wrong. That story was created from the same inaccurate exit polls that led to much of the eleciton night trouble. Thus, both the claim by some GOP that “the huge black vote proves fraud” and the Dem claim that “the huge black vote shows black anger, or it is what swamped the polls with confused first-time voterzs,” or whatever, is simply not based on any facts.
PALM BEACH COUNTY. The recount here was pretty much in line with the result in Broward. Gore carried the county strongly; the recount gave him additional votes; but Judge Burton (the Chairman) and Teresa LePore (the designer of the infamous butterfly ballot) didn’t agree with Carol Roberts (the very partisan Dem Commissioner) on enough ballots to give Gore the lead.
DADE COUNTY. The result here shows the pattern of gains where you were already ahead. In Dade there ws a partial recount, in mostly Dem precincts (they went in Numerical order, and the Dem precincts were the low-numbered ones, mostly), but Dade wasn’t as strongly Dem as the other two, and the gain was smaller . When the remainder of Dade began to be recounted in December, under the second Flaorida Supreme Court Order, Bush was actually gaining, as almost every informed observer was sure would happen, based on the pattern of gains in the other precincts, as the pro-Bush precincts began to be recounted (especially the Cuban precincts). So, if the remainder of Dade had been completely recounted, it is virtually certain that it would have helped Bush, not Gore.
That priniple is another reason that , even if the December recount had gone forward, Gore would not have won. The few counties that did complete the recoount showed very little gain for either side, but in line with the principle that he who ws ahead gains, and Bush was leading in most of the remianing counties. Ron Klain, the Gore leader, declared that Gore had gained 56 votes from the counties that did recount, but that is simply a lie. There are news accounts from each of the 10 or so counties that did finish, and it was a wash. There is simply no possibility that the counties other than Dade (which was going to have a Bush gain of 50-100) would have given Gore any visible gain, let alone the 400-600 votes he would have needed.
3. The mistakes at the polls. There are two major areas of controversy: the “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach , and less well known, the “caterpillar ballot” in Duval County. Here, the facts are simply overwhelming that these formats did cost Gore votes, EVERYTHING ELSE BEING EQUAL. That is, if some other ballot format had been used, he would not have lost some of these votes, but he might have lost others (voters confused for other reasons, type too small, etc). If your voters are fundamentally more ignorant, you are going to lose votes. I am sure that more Dems overslept, got drunk, forgot where the polls were, got distracted, etc. It just doesn’t matter. The only votes that count are the ones that are done right. And in both Palm Beach and Duval, the voters just didn’t do it right, and there is no way to determine which votes to count differently, and there is no basis for doing so. Just as with the old lever machines, where there is a big sign saying “DON’T PUSH THE CANDIDATE LEVERS BACK UP BEFORE YOU REGISTER YOUR VOTE BY THROWING THE BIG RED LEVER” there are always some people who lose their votes by doing exactly that. In New York city, the blank votes, largely for that reason, ranged from 3 to 9% in different assembly districts, correlated very well with GOP vote. The more GOP, the less stupid errors.
That being said, it is simply blinking reality to say that there weren’t errors made, BY THE VOTERS, that substantially disadvantaged Gore. In Palm Beach, despite all the GOP muttering about why Buchanan should have gotten the vote he did, it just isn’t so. First, his percentage in Palm Beach was massively out of line with the other Florida counties, without any strong basis in his past successes. Much more convincing, to me, is to look at precincts that were right across the street from each other, in the same kind of neighborhoods, but with one side of the street in Palm Beach County, and the other side in an adjoining county. Because that area is all part of the huge South Florida urban area, there are many, many such precincts. I have seen maps of all the precincts, by percentage for Buchanan, and everywhere, the adjacent precincts had 3-4 times the percentage of Buchanan votes in Palm Beach as in the adjoining precinct in Broward or other county. It is true that the Dems encouraged and overstated the problem (They got, in 2 days, 8000 affidavits from people who said that they cast one of the 3000 votes for Buchanan!!). But the precinct returns fully convince me that at least 1/3 of those Buchanan votes were intending to vote for Gore. The Butterfly ballot also caused some loses and double punches all up and down the line. An analysis of the double punches showed that they were heavily concentrated in adjoing doubles: Bush Gore; Gore Nader, Nader Buchanan, etc. But since Gore carried the county heavily, errors on balance tended to drain votes away from his margin.
DUVAL COUNTY. In Duval County, rather than putting the 10 candidates (itself the result of earlier “reform” efforts) into a single spread, candidates were put over 2 pages. This shouldn’t have been a big problem, but the Dems had advertised heavily, especially in poor areas, “Vote Every Page.” This led to significant overvoting -- which analysis showed was usually Gore-Gonzo (where Gonzo means the last few candidates, such as MonicaMorehead, or the Socialist Worker, who got very few clear votes anywhere. Again, we can wish it weren’t so, but the math is indisputable -- much higher overvotes in Duval versus elsewhere; much higher overvotes in low-income Gore areas; and a pattern of overvotes caused by votes cast for loon candidates that no one voted for any place else.
But in terms of whether a vote should count, its clear that those votes can’t count.
In just the same way, the claimed GOP voters who were discouraged can’t be recreated out of thin air. I note, however, that GOP’ers didn’t believe it when Dems complained in 1980 that Carter’s early defeat discouraged Dems in California, leading to loss of congressional seats -- and they had a lot longer to worry about it. The fact is that the network call came with only 10 minutes left in the Central Time zone, consisting of about 700 precincts. On average, maybe 1 vote per minute is cast per precinct. Despite anecdotal claims, of the same type as the anecdotal claims of Blacks being turned away from the polls, I see no hard evidence of any visable number of people deserting the polls in the last 10 minutes. I don’t doubt that it could have been a couple of hundred, but not the 10,000 or more claimed by some. And , again, it’s their own fault -- just like the dems. THE LEGAL CASES. Obviously, this is a source of endless writings, thousands of pages of law reviews, etc. But, to me, the important point is: Supreme Court or not, Gore would not have won the recount, at least not without an even higher level of chicanery than the Florida Supreme Court had shown to that point (and their lst decision had only been 4-3 -- I think they had shot their bolt with that). The GOP thought that the Fla Court would try to steal it for Gore, and looked to the US Supreme Court for protection; the Dems claimed to think that the US Supreme Court would steal it for Bush. In the end, the basic counting sytem called it for Bush, and the US Supreme Court simply ratified that result.
Obviously, people can argue against these points, and a complete defense would take a chapter for every sentence. But that’s my best judgment, trying to answer Hank’s question and compress the whole issue into a couple of pages.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.