kodiak, Good point in the article that you cite. Hey someone else saw things this way too- My guess too is that this is the real reason that the full recount stopped in Dade County....
But Democrats have moved on from citing the flawed Illinois precedent to attacking "thuggish" Republican
demonstrators who they say intimidated the Miami-Dade canvassing board into canceling its planned recount.
Nonsense, say board members. "I was not intimidated," David Leahy told CNN. "My vote had nothing to with the
protests. It simply had to do with not enough time."
An interesting alternative explanation for why the Miami-Dade board acted as it did comes from Brian Kalt, an
assistant professor at Michigan State University, who examined closely the 135 out of 614 precincts the board had
counted before it stopped. He found that the board, counting in numerical order, had started with overwhelmingly
Democratic precincts. Mr. Kalt says the recounted precincts cast 74% of their vote for Mr. Gore and only 24%
for Mr. Bush. The county as a whole voted only 53% for Gore.
"In the recounted precincts, Gore picked up only 157 votes, and the count was just about to move into heavily
Republican and Cuban areas," Mr. Kalt told me. "Given how the rest of the precincts would have voted, I don't
see how Gore would have picked up votes. If the trend had continued, an admitted if, Bush would actually have
gained 400 votes." It's possible that Miami-Dade's board, which contained no Republicans, also had that
calculation in mind when it unanimously agreed to stop its recount. |
