Posted on 05/25/2008 5:24:16 PM PDT by Sub-Driver
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 that “the Bush people were trying to stop votes from being counted and the Gore people were just trying to get votes counted” while Laura Dern, who plays Katherine Harris, recalled that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling left her “devastated because there were uncounted votes.”
The lead of an April 4, 2001 USA Today story headlined, “Newspapers' recount shows Bush prevailed,” by reporter Dennis Cauchon:
George W. Bush would have won a hand count of Florida's disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used, the first full study of the ballots reveals. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes -- more than triple his official 537-vote margin -- if every dimple, hanging chad and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes, a USA TODAY/Miami Herald/Knight Ridder study shows. The study is the first comprehensive review of the 61,195 "undervote" ballots that were at the center of Florida's disputed presidential election....
That look was followed in November by an analysis by a consortium of media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, CNN and AP. It determined that George W. Bush still would have won under either legally possible recount scenario which could have occurred: The Florida Supreme Court ordered recount of undervotes statewide or Gore’s request for a recount in certain counties. The New York Times led its November 12, 2001 front page article, “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” by reporters 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....
In summarizing the consortium’s findings, however, the November 13, 2001 MRC CyberAlert recounted CBS Evening News anchor Dan Rather gave equal weight to a scenario which never could have occurred, a statewide recount of all overvotes in which the intent of the voter would have been intuited, as to how Bush would still have won in the only legally possible scenario, a recount of undervotes:
In the second half of the hour-long CBS Evening News on Monday night [November 12], Rather announced:
A consortium of news organizations today released their joint findings on the disputed Bush/Gore presidential election results from Florida. They suggest the limited hand re-count of votes requested by Democrat Al Gore would still have given Florida and the presidency to George W. Bush. But this study also found that if there had been a re-count of all disqualified ballots statewide it might have produced a narrow Gore victory.
As Monday’s New York Times headline clearly stated, "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote," but Rather failed to correct his earlier reporting. At the top of the CBS Evening News back on the December 13, 2000, Rather had declared:
Good evening. Texas Governor George Bush tonight will assume the mantle and the honor of President-elect. This comes 24 hours after a sharply split and, some say, politically and ideologically motivated U.S. Supreme Court ended Vice President Gore’s contest of the Florida election and, in effect, handed the presidency to Bush.
Neither ABC’s World News Tonight nor the NBC Nightly News, both of which remained the usual half-hour on a busy news day on Monday, mentioned the latest media effort at a Florida re-count.
—Brent Baker is Vice President for Research and Publications at the Media Research Center
My HBO free pass from DirecTV expired just in time....today!
The facts will be in short supply in coming days. Remembering them and reminding the ignorant that the vaunted Democrat Party is the party of liers and cheats. Remember on Memorial Day that the only votes that any party worked to ensure were not counted were the absentee votes of America’s military. The people who did this are the real Democrat Party and they are to be reviled and condemned.
Well from what I’ve read they’re light on the facts as usual - is the word bias?
I guess this movie is what the libs need for closure.
So who won American Idol?
< /sarc not off>
.......2000 was the Dem trying to steal an election and now history ......
My impression is that the Dims were pulling out all the stops to the max and fighting tooth and nail legally and illegally in what amounted to a coup attempt.
What about those military ballots that were being rejected? Do the dims ever worry about THOSE disenfranchised voters?
The Dems tried to count these so-called “spoiled ballots” as votes for Gore, on the basis that people simply meant to vote for Gore, but messed up their ballots. From this scam came the Democrats line “count ALL the votes”. Republicans should have responded with “count all the LEGITIMATE votes”.
As a result, I will find it difficult to leave any offices blank on my ballots in the future. I would propose that every office on every ballot should include an extra block of “no vote”. Democrats would never go for that though. Just like requiring voters to show ID’s, it takes away their potential for fraud.
Sincerely,
Hillary Clinton
I lurked then, that’s what got me here in the first place.
Ikept the /sarc off because the Sheep could care less these days, as long as they can still watch Oprah/Wheel/Jepoardy/Idol/Dancing-with-the-Stars.
Kind of a bread and circuses thing the Left does, you know...
HBO just wanted to cleanse its palate of the John Adams series, being the pro-liberty, pro-Founder, pro-American vision that it was...
I’m sure HBO showed the laimstream media declaring Gore the winner of Florida at 6:49 PM central .
Docudramas of this sort normally would put info on the screen at the end, explaining that recounts by various media showed Bush did in fact win.
Also, they say the Supreme Court ordered a stay which made it impossible to count by Dec 12, and then ruled there was no time left to count so thw election was over. No, the Supreme Court stayed a recount of only some votes, which was not being conducted uniformly across the state. The SC overwhelmingly found that the recount was violating equal protection. The SC did not create the problem by ordering a stay.
“If you were on this board back then you know the truth .. 2000 was the Dem trying to steal an election and now history”
Al Gore was simply on a vote shopping expedition with a compliant and very political Florida judiciaries assistance - changing the rules after the votes were recorded and doing so only for those counties Gore was vote-shopping in
at no time did Gore seek to “correct” anything about the voting statewide or seek a statewide count on any new basis
the entire time he was seeking to squeeze a few more votes out of some Dim-dominant counties, and forcing the state total to be adjusted therewith
the Florida judiciary went along with the vote shopping expedition and the U.S. Supreme Court - twice - told them - the courts - to knock it off
the judges antics in support of Gore were not only set in opposition to the Florida state constitution, they had the affect of disenfranchising all the voters of all the counties the judicial rulings were not to apply to, setting one class of voters - those who Gore wanted to go shopping for - as deserving of general rules for vote counting that were not to be applied to all Florida voters - thus the “equal protection” clause was violated by the Gore-judicial-assisted cherry picking
regardless, in accordance with the Florida and U.S. Constitutions, the Florida legislature had already certified the winner of the Florida vote in the constitutionally required time frame
four years later the Florida voters vindicated the U.S. Supreme Court decision (maybe, in part, because the people in the Florida panhandle did not hear the game was over before they voted that time - as they did in 2000)
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