Posted on 11/11/2001 6:49:42 PM PST by PianoMan
September 11, horrible as it was, would be unimaginable under Algore and these subsequence weeks positively unthinkable.
Return of the Chad
The New York Times today unleashes the results of its much-anticipated re-re-recount of some ballots in the Florida election and concludes that "Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots."
"Might" is a pretty important word there. Mr. Bush "might" have won, too. The bottom line is that after spending $900,000 on this project, the Times and its partner news organizations are not much closer to finding out what they set out to find than they were when they started.
The key information in the Times package of information on this story comes at the end of a sidebar on how the ballot review was conducted.
The Times reports: "In many places, supervisors found it difficult to find all the ballots that were uncounted on election night, even by running them through the machines. The problem was worst in punch-card counties, as chads dislodged and undervotes suddenly disappeared. Even in optical-scan counties, though, supervisors were often unable to exactly replicate the undervotes and overvotes from the election. In all, the research center reviewed 175,010 ballots, more than 99 percent of the approximately 176,446 that were considered overvoted or undervoted in the certified vote total."
This confirms the Republican contention that running the ballots through the machines again and again degrades them and alters the result. And the discrepancy between the 175,010 ballots counted by the consortium and the 176,446 ballots that were rejected by election officials is 1,436. That is a significant variation between what happened on election night and what happened in the media recount, especially considering that under even the most favorable standard to Mr. Gore, he "might" have won the election by only 424 votes.
The Times editorial compounds the error by asserting, "It appears Al Gore might have carried Florida if he had successfully pursued a statewide manual recount of all 175,010 rejected ballots -- a strategy he never tried." But the "all 175,010" number refers only to the number of rejected ballots the New York Times and its partners in the press were able to reconstruct or find -- not the number on election night. Note the careful use, again, of the word "might." Mr. Bush "might" have won, too, given the uncertain and disorderly nature of any such re-re-recount operation.
no one seems to remember how it was demonstrated that one DNC mole could push a stiff wire through a whole stack of ballots, "fishing for undervotes", spoiling a whole lot of votes for other candidates along the way but picking up many for their own guy. This was perfected in Chicago and remember who was in charge of the election stealing operation for Gore. I distinctly remember them showing this on Fox back in November and saying this is why the ballots had to be watched and tracked as they travelled. (any delays between polling place and counting place are big signs of tampering).
And here I was thinking Bush had become the President when he was inaugurated...silly me...
Ain't it a shame all those books in which he slams Katherine Harris mercilessly were printed before the NORC was through?
Now, everyone else will know what Freepers have known about Toobin for years now, and he won't have credibility with them either....Yeee-esss!
Bryan, did you read the John Lott piece in the LA Times (called an op-ed, was NEWS)? BLACK REPUBLICANS were disenfranchised in FLA! I want some apologies from AG Bob Butterworth, J Jackson, Kwasi, Julian B., Mary Frances....!
GOP Was the Real Victim in Fla. Vote, John Lott-LA Times story, Black Republican ballots invalidated in Dem. precincts.
The "instructions" were given to them by paid Gore campaign operatives who were brought down from Florida to take people to the polls. The official written instructions were to vote only once in each race.
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