You're welcome.
Posted on 11/13/2001 3:08:06 AM PST by ChuckHam
NEW YORK, Nov. 12 — You would never know it from the confused, pre-crash coverage in the nation’s elite media Monday morning, but Al Gore beat George Bush in Florida by almost every vote-counting standard save the one that the Gore team managed to choose. This is consistent with the Democratic candidate’s hapless campaign. The Supreme Court did not have to take the election away from Al Gore: he and his campaign gave it away themselves. And in doing so, they helped George W. Bush and his minions undermine American democracy.
MOST OF MONDAY’S headlines reporting the much-delayed results of the $900,000 study of more than 175,000 votes conducted for a consortium of eight news organizations by the University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center (NORC) focus on the fact that when the Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision handing the election to Bush — going so far as to reinterpret the law and refusing to allow its decision to be held as precedent — they were operating under a vote-counting scenario under which Bush would have prevailed. Indeed, Gore attorney David Boies, speaking before the court, explicitly ruled out a more inclusive recount of Florida’s votes that not only would have elected his man, but would have been immeasurably more fair to the people of Florida who had a right to have their voices heard in determining their state’s choice for president. Boies asked the Supreme Court to count “undervotes” but not “overvotes.” Leave it to Al Gore to pick a legal team that fights tooth and nail against his best interests.
But buried beneath the deliberately misleading headlines on Monday is the inescapable fact that Al Gore was the genuine choice of a miniscule majority of Florida’s voters as well as the victor by more than 540,000 votes nationally. On the other hand, George Bush would have won a recount using the “undercount only” scenario and so the Supreme Court majority that labored so torturously to hand Bush his “victory” dishonored itself for nothing. Al Gore professed a public desire to have Florida “count all the votes,” but he never instructed his lawyers to demand the recount of all votes in all 67 counties that would have revealed his victory. (The award for most egregious misrepresentation goes to CNN.com for its headline that the results “showed George Bush winning even with a statewide recount.” It showed nothing of the sort.)
Gore would also have won if Florida had managed to include the 113,000 ballots deemed to be spoiled by so-called “overvotes.” Of these, more than 75,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate and just 29,000 chose Bush. Common sense demands that we admit that most of these voters were not supporters of either Patrick Buchanan or the Socialist Workers’ Party. Again, Gore is the winner here by a significant majority. Moreover many overvotes were entirely legal. They simply weren’t counted because a voter may have punched in Gore’s name AND written it down to be certain the counter got the message. Gore never asked that these votes be counted, either.
As the Associated Press report put it, “In the review of all the state’s disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide.” In other words, he got more votes than George Bush. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you count “hanging chads” and he won if you counted a “dimpled chad.” He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot — the so-called “Palm Beach” standard. He even won if you counted only a fully-punched chad. He won if you counted partially filled oval on an optical scan and he won if you counted only a fully-filled optical scan. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter how you count it, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote matter, Al Gore would be sitting in the Oval Office today.
Of course these facts are of only academic interest. George Bush has been sworn in as president and the United States is at war and the media is not much interested in determining the democratic intent of the voters in an election already consigned to history. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer called the results “superfluous,” adding, “The voters settled this election last fall, and the nation moved on a long time ago.” Much of the national media apparently concurs. Indeed, they concurred even during the Florida recount. James A. Baker declared victory on behalf of his client, George W. Bush, on the basis of a faulty vote count and the media considered the rest of the story to be hardly more than wishful thinking and possibly self-hypnosis on the part of the Gore team. The narrative enjoyed a few interruptions of course, and required not only the Supreme Court to sustain it, but also what Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal termed a “bourgeois riot” by Republican operatives in Palm Beach county to shut down a vote that looked like it might go Gore’s way. But it held.
One always had the impression that the major news outlets were reluctant to report the study in such a way that it injured Bush’s shaky legitimacy. After Sept. 11, many seemed to feel it was their patriotic duty not to do anything to call into question the authority of the commander-in-chief. New York Times political reporter Richard Berke admitted as much when he wrote in his newspaper shortly after the attack that the NORC report on Florida now seemed “utterly irrelevant” and, had it been released too close to the World Trade Center attacks, “might have stoked the partisan tensions.”
Obviously, those worries were for naught. The horrific crash of the American Airlines jetliner in Queens today ensures that even this study will receive next to no attention. But the ultimate price will not be insignificant. As recently as last week, according to the Gallup Organization, nearly half of Americans surveyed remain convinced that President Bush either “won on a technicality” or “stole the election.” Even so, during the past year, the U.S. political system has produced virtually nothing to repair an antiquated election system that spends billions for advertising and almost nothing for accuracy. And in the election of 2000, it put the wrong man in the White House.
BARF ALERT! BARF ALERT! BARF ALERT!
Wasn't that rude of the plane, crashing just to deny the libs media coverage for their delusions.</extreme sarcasm off>
Now let me say I apologize to horse$hit for insulting it like that.
You're welcome.
OK, I'm confused. How many standards are costumarily applied in the counting of votes and who decides which one to use?
I think the gubmint should dispatch grief counselors and lots of hankies to help the Dims through their denial.
Alterman is such a liar.
Bush beat Gore one every scenario, but one -- which involved a handcount of EVERY ballot in every county. Something so fair that had Gore requested it, Bush would have been hard-pressed to refuse -- despite that it didn't jive with the election rules.
Both Gore and the Fla Sup Ct chose illegal and unfair tactics and both tracks were losers.
However, while I have sympathy for someone who didn't punch a hole hard enough, I don't for the 'overvotes'. Take a deep breath, read the rules, and follow them! If you don't vote right, your vote shouldn't matter.
You can posit a lot of what-ifs. If Nader didn't run, Gore would clearly have won. If Buchanan didn't run, strangely, Gore would clearly have won. But they did, so he didn't. It's not Bush's fault that the fringe candidate on the left was more popular than the fringe candidate on the right.
LOL! A little "editing" puts things right into perspective...
Only if you count the illegal ballots with more than one vote on them.
That's just plain crazy. Never have ballots with more than one vote been counted. THEY PICKED TWO PEOPLE! NUTS!
Well, the simple fact is, that the plurality of Floridians who chose to vote, wanted Gore to win. You can't ignore that finding.Oh look, Donuts, I don't ignore that finding. How and ever, despite the leaks from the left that Gore would have had a "landslide" victory in Florida had the "overvotes" been counted, apparently the margin was only a couple of hundred votes. I'm not sure that that doesn't fall within the margin of error, so I still consider this to be somewhat inconclusive, despite Alterman's whining.
Think of election night as a "double-blind" test. No one really knows what the margin is going to be, thus it's somewhat hard to fix the thing. Now once you get into recounts, you put humans into the mix, so fixing the election becomes somewhat easier. That's why I trust machines and not humans. Especially Democratic humans. And guess what, they don't trust me. So if we leave it to the machines, we're more likely than not to get a fair count of the legal ballots, as opposed to a handcount of all the ballots, to produce a legal tally of votes.
However, while I have sympathy for someone who didn't punch a hole hard enough, I don't for the 'overvotes'. Take a deep breath, read the rules, and follow them! If you don't vote right, your vote shouldn't matter.
So you get it. Alterman, and other Democrats of his ilk, chose to ignore the rules when they didn't skew towards their interest. Republicans, on the other hand, used the rules to their advantage. That was the difference. We stayed within the law, and thus had a stronger constitutional position throughout the recount.
Maybe more people cast ballots for Gore, but only by a hair. A couple of hundred ballots is simply not conclusive, especially given the fact that this situation could only have developed in a situation in which all disputed ballots were resolved without question. This reality simply didn't exist. And it never would have.
Now perhaps Nader's presence almost certainly led to Gore's defeat (although the absence of Nader might have led to a different strategy on Bush's part). Still and all, unlike Alterman, I have no problems with Bush's victory: it was pursuant to the law and the Constitution. And we have, in the end, the most salutory result of all: Bush is president in time of war, not Algore, whose ego would never allow him to admit that he wasn't always the smartest man in the room.
The thought of that ship of fools surrounding Al Gore actually trying to run this war is frightening. Just think of George W. Bush's election as proof that there exists a merciful God.
Be Seeing You,
Chris
Exactly what Justice Rehnquist et al stated, heck even O'Connor agreed that voters have to follow instructions.
If EVERY vote was counted Bush still wins. Especially if it includes the absentee ballots that a federal judge ruled must be counted. The media always leaves those out. I wonder why? </ sarcasm >
The vote counting standard is the only standard, really. No undervotes, no over-votes, and NO VOTER "INTENT"
BARF !
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