Posted on 09/18/2001 9:13:19 AM PDT by Sideshow Bob
One of the unnoticed after-effects of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington has been a delay in the planned release of the last — and largest — media recount of presidential election returns in Florida. Though it seems strange to contemplate today, as George W. Bush goes about his business as commander in chief, under different circumstances this week would likely have seen a high-profile attempt to renew the question of his legitimacy as president.
Before the events of September 11, editors at a consortium of blue-chip news organizations — the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, Associated Press, CNN, and others — were in the final stages of work on their analysis of voting in Florida's 67 counties. "We were pretty much homing in [on publication]," says Dan Keating, who is running the project for the Washington Post. Now, the work is on hold, with the newspapers and networks hanging on to the story until a better time. "At this point, I think it's safe to say that this is not what the world is focused on," Keating says.
But whatever happens in coming weeks, the news organizations will have to fight the overwhelming sense that the story, in which they invested hundreds of thousands of dollars, is so...over. The country is facing an unprecedented crisis, Bush is president, buoyed by wartime approval ratings of 80-plus percent, and Al Gore has all but disappeared from the national scene. If anyone other than Democratic National Committee chief Terry McAuliffe and the editors of the New York Times are interested in the issue of hanging chads, they are not saying so.
It's not the outcome originally envisioned for the project, which was born in the heat of the election controversy and scheduled for completion several months ago. "There was some thought that it would only take ten weeks to wrap it up," says Julie Antelman, a spokeswoman for the National Opinion Research Center, which was hired by the consortium to do the actual vote counting. "But once it started it became obvious that that couldn't happen."
That's an understatement. Even though NORC assigned 153 "coders" — vote counters — to the project, the ballot analysis dragged on and on. There were problems getting access to the ballots. There were problems devising the best system for categorizing clues to voters' intent in ballots rejected during the original count. And as the "coding" went on, other media recounts, including the Miami Herald count that perhaps best reproduced actual conditions at the time of the election, showed that Bush would have won Florida under almost every conceivable scenario.
In addition, the fact that the big-media recount has taken so long — it is now more than ten months after Election Day — indicates that the mantra of "count every vote," whatever it might have meant to Gore's supporters, was not a practical possibility at the time of the election. Would Democrats prefer that the count still be going on today? The delays in the media recount are another indication that the vote counting that was done at the time, under the rules in place at the time, was the best indicator of who actually won.
All of that, together with the overwhelming events of the moment, make it likely that we won't see any front-page recount stories anytime soon. The news organizations are stuck with a very expensive story that has become a relic of an earlier time. The world has changed, and they are struggling with the realization that their meticulous inspection of hanging chads simply doesn't matter anymore.
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Buh bye, disruptor.
You're not factual in your comments - a majority of Americans thought Bush was the legitimatally the President.
Stay away if you're going to twist facts - oops, I forgot - you're a lib.
Nuked by Jim or an admin, by all indications. Posts are gone along with the disruptor.
"John's All Purpose Disruptor Santizer PERL Script."
thanks again!
And in fact did win it by a half dozen or so of them!
Incredible.
In unrelated news, it was revealed that Palm Beach County stored several thousand of as-yet uncounted votes in the World Trade Center. This information has come from Rep. Gary Condit (Whatever-CA) who said that he got a call from Chandra Levy verifying that she was in hiding in the complex and had seen the dozens of boxes.
We KNOW that Gore would have won Florida if the votes of everyone who tried to vote for him (yes, and everyone who tried to vote for Bush) had been counted.
It's okay for conservatives to crow. Their man is in the WH, their Supreme Court did what they wanted it to, and their man Baker mercilessly outsmarted the Gore team post-election. But it is not okay for conservatives to claim that black is white and expect to get away with it. The truth is that the majority of Americans who voted last Nov. 7 voted for Gore. Had all the voting gone smoothly and had all the votes for Gore been counted, he'd be the president today.
Quick reality check here:
The number of counties won by Bush and Gore has no relation to the popular vote in itself because counties range in population from a few hundred to millions. There is also no correlation between the population of a state and the number of counties.
Gore won the most heavily populated urban counties by wide margins while Bush won most of the least populous rural counties.
An interesting statistic, to be sure, but hardly indicative of vote tampering.
Thank God Gore isn't President!
Hey, don't forget the Republican voters who mercilessly outsmarted the Democrat voters by filling out their ballots correctly!!
This guy is as bad as the Times; both are suggesting that it doesn't matter whether Bush won; i.e., that 'he stole the election, but there's nothing you can do about it.' I look forward to these characters publishing their phony stories, because I have hundreds of files of articles downloaded, showing that Al Gore tried to steal the election, and that Bush won it, legitimately. The longer they hold back with their phony stories, the longer their supporters can say, "We can prove that Gore won, but now is not the time for that." Any time is the right time!
"The best thing she gave to her country was a clear Florida vote for President George W. Bush"
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