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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Srexley who wrote (459993)	9/16/2003 6:54:12 PM
From: Wayners	Respond to of 769670

It turns out that if Gore had gotten his way, he still would have lost according to the newspaper studies.

To: Srexley who wrote (459993)	9/16/2003 6:55:01 PM
From: MSI	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Negatory. That was quoting you. Both parties are suspect. The only solution is to count all ballots. The results don't look good -- According to the Miami Herald of April 5th, 2001, and other publications: "Throughout the month-long post-election crisis, Republican Party officials and their media supporters regularly denounced the Gore campaign for selecting four heavily Democratic counties for recounts, areas which would be most favorable to the Democratic nominee. The Herald/USA Today study essentially reverses this procedure—using a more liberal standard for vote-counting in the 62 counties which showed a significant Bush margin, and the more restrictive standard in the four big urban counties where Gore rolled up a large majority. The result of such a procedure is predictable. The real result of the Herald/USA Today study shows that Gore won a statewide victory by a margin ranging from 363 to over 1,000 votes, depending on the criterion for accepting dimpled ballots. The Herald conceded this in a story published April 5, entitled, “Recounts could have given Gore the edge.” The article explained: “Had the Broward and Palm Beach canvassing boards used the loosest standard in judging ballots and finished the recount by the court-set deadline—which Palm Beach did not meet— Gore almost certainly would have won. He might have gained 2,022 votes in the two counties when Bush's state lead was only 903 (emphasis added). In other words, Gore's margin would have increased to 1,119, more than enough to comfortably secure him Florida's 25 electoral votes and thus the presidency. Even under more conservative standards, counting dimpled chads only if they were present elsewhere on the ballot, Gore emerges the winner by about 300 votes when the study's recount includes a review of undervotes in all Florida counties. The April 5 Herald article received scant attention in the national press, and was presented by the newspapers' study as the least likely outcome of a Florida recount. The decision by the newspapers to exclude an examination of these four counties' undervotes from their review cannot be explained by their desire to arrive at the most objective accounting of the vote. Rather, it appears that their study has been designed with the aim of arriving at a certain outcome: legitimizing the Bush victory."

To: Srexley who wrote (459993)	9/16/2003 6:57:01 PM
From: MSI	Respond to of 769670

But don't feel it was only the GOP keeping Gore out and Bush in. This is criticism of Dems even from the socialist press: "The role of the Democrats" wsws.org "The Herald/USA Today study highlights the key role of the Democratic Party as a virtual accomplice in the right-wing campaign to swing Florida's 25 electoral votes and the presidency to Bush. While the Republican Party was waging a furious struggle to halt all recounts, which culminated in the US Supreme Court intervention, local Democratic officials in the south Florida counties revealed nearly complete indifference to the basic democratic principle that every vote should be counted. In Miami-Dade, of course, this culminated in the notorious decision of the local election officials to call off the vote count after a menacing demonstration by a hundred vociferous right-wingers, many of them Republican congressional staffers flown in from Washington for the occasion. But in Broward and Palm Beach counties the record was little better, with a slow and arbitrary procedure that resulted in hundreds of votes being excluded from the certified total. The April 5 Herald article states that “the canvassing boards in both counties had difficulty maintaining uniform standards of judging ballots.... Among the ballots examined in Broward and Palm Beach by The Herald and auditors from BDO Seidman, LLP were hundreds of dimpled ballots credited to no candidate that were virtually identical to scores of dimpled ballots awarded to Bush or Gore.” In other words, significant numbers of ballots designated by the study to be for either Bush or Gore were counted as no-votes by the local canvassing boards. These excluded ballots, disproportionately for Gore, would have given the Democratic candidate the election. Hundreds of missing undervotes Questions are raised about the conduct of local officials of both parties by another revelation from the newspapers' study. When representatives from the newspapers' went to local election boards to examine these undervotes, in county after county the number of undervote ballots produced failed to match the totals reported by these same counties in the immediate aftermath of the November 7 vote. In fact, only 8 of 67 counties were able to produce for the newspapers' inspection the exact number of undervotes they had reported on election night. Mark Seibel, the Miami Herald managing editor who supervised the newspapers' recount, commented to the New York Times, “We just had to accept ballot slippage, ballots that will never be counted,” referring to these lost votes as “the ballot twilight.” But the discrepancy between the number of undervotes reported and the number produced by the counties at the very least should prompt a call for a probe into what became of these missing ballots, and the role of local elections officials in their disappearance. One county where such an investigation would be warranted is Orange County, which includes Orlando. While local officials in Orange County reported following the election that they had 966 ballots with no discernible vote for president, when the Herald went to recount these votes the county could only produce 639 such ballots. Official Orange County results show Gore/Lieberman winning by 5,703 votes, with 50 percent of the vote as opposed to 48 percent for Bush/Cheney. But the Orange County supervisor at the time was Mel Martinez, a co-chair of the Republican election campaign and prominent Bush supporter who is now the secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush administration. While a certain degree of discrepancy in the undervote ballot numbers could be attributed to machine or human error, a difference of 327 ballots certainly deserves examination. Another disparity uncovered by the Herald/USA Today review found that voters in majority-black Florida precincts were nearly four times as likely to have their presidential ballots invalidated as voters in precincts overwhelming comprised of white voters. Additionally, according to USA Today, “Black voters were more likely to have been affected by error-prone antiquated voting equipment, poorly trained poll workers and general confusion at polling places.” At the heart of the disputed election in Florida lay basic questions of democratic rights. Despite the media's attempts to narrow the focus to “hanging chads” and other technicalities, the central issue in the 37 days between the November 7 vote and the US Supreme Court's December 12 ruling to halt the recount in Florida was the democratic right of those who cast their ballots to have their votes counted. In its ruling ordering a statewide recount, the Florida Supreme Court declared that state law required “that every citizen's vote be counted whenever possible, whether in an election for a local commissioner or an election for President of the United States.” The US Supreme Court's decision the very next day to stop the recount was based on a rejection of this basic democratic right. As the basis of the high court's ruling to stop the Florida recount, Justice Antonin Scalia commented that “there is no right of suffrage” in a presidential election. Any honest post-election accounting of the Florida vote should at the very minimum attempt to determine the intent of the voters. The very framework of the Herald/USA Today review, however, precludes such an accurate accounting of the vote. In the four months since the high court ruling handed the presidency to George W. Bush, overwhelming evidence has emerged that the democratic right to vote was compromised in the Florida election. The US Civil Rights Commission heard evidence that significant numbers of black voters were disenfranchised—were denied voter registration cards, hindered by roadblocks and police intimidation, and turned away at the polls. Thousands of eligible voters, erroneously identified as felons, were denied the right to vote. Data from the newspapers' study raises questions as to the democratic character of the election, a lack of statewide standards to tally the vote, and the possibility of outright fraud on the part of elections officials and Republican Party functionaries. Upon uncovering such evidence, any truly non-biased and independent investigation into the Florida vote would go out of its way to see that every vote be counted, and be on the lookout for even the slightest sign of malfeasance. But the Herald/USA Today survey, on the contrary, does just the opposite, serving more as a cover-up for the anti-democratic ruling of the US Supreme Court which halted the recount of votes in Florida, installing George W. Bush as president. See Also: Background to the 2000 US election Florida's legacy of voter disenfranchisement [9 April 2001] Why did the US media black out the Civil Rights Commission report on the Florida vote? [21 March 2001] US Commission on Civil Rights charges "voter disenfranchisement ... at heart" of Bush victory in Florida [10 March 2001] The US election Florida citizens denounce Republican efforts to disenfranchise voters [30 November 2000] Something rotten in the state of Florida [9 November 2000]