<font color=blue>"The real disgrace of the 2000 election was the bald efforts of the Democrats to prevent the counting of absentee ballots of soldiers posted overseas."<font color=black>
Yes that was one. There were others......
I would add to that the attempt by Gore & DNC lawyers to
attempt to have recounts only in counties that were heavy
democratic strongholds (and each county using their own
separate standards), while the rest of the states votes
stick with the totals originally reported. This was done
in clear violation with Federal Election laws that insure
that every vote be properly counted using the same
standards.
And for the rest of the story..........
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The Myth of the Stolen Election<font size=3>
(edited - see link for the whole story)
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....Another myth is that Gore simply wanted all the votes
counted. This is absolutely false. Gore lawyers and their
supporters attempted to disqualify votes of some military
voters overseas, and of absentee voters in several Florida
counties. Both groups, not surprisingly, strongly
supported Bush.
On the other hand, they tried to create votes that the machines had determined contained no vote for President (the “undervote”), but only in four heavily Democratic counties: Broward, Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia. In each of these counties, Democratic Party officials would control the hand count of the “undervote.”
So this was no exercise in civic minded duty - the logic
was to find votes for Gore, and cancel votes for Bush.
The left likes to say that the United States Supreme Court gave the election to Bush. They did no such thing. What they did was reverse the Florida Supreme Court’s effort to keep on counting until Gore won. The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v Gore may not have been a model of jurisprudence, but the left also ignores the fact that the decision to over-rule the Florida Supreme Court was not a 5-4 decision dictated by the five conservative members of the Court, but a 7 to 2 decision. Even two liberals on the Court were offended by the machinations of the Florida court and its creation of a chaotic vote counting system for the “undervotes”.
The system decreed by the Florida Supreme Court in its 4 to 3 ruling (bitterly condemned by the Court’s own Chief Justice as “overreaching”) would have allowed inconsistent rules for counting the “undervotes” even within an individual county. For example, the Florida Supreme Court decided to accept the results of a partially completed hand recount performed in Dade County by a group of county officials using one set of rules and then add to it the results of a hand recount of the remainder of the county’s “undervote” to be performed by a different set of counters in Tallahassee, whose counting rules were not established.
The Florida Supreme Court also decided to accept the results of hand recounts completed in Broward, Volusia and Palm Beach Counties, though each county had established very different standards for identifying which partially punched ballots were to be considered actual votes. (Broward had adopted the most liberal standard, and gave Gore his biggest boost during the 37 day period: almost 600 net votes.)
No clear rules for how to count or not count
the “undervote” in Florida’s other counties were
established by the Florida Supreme Court, and seven U.S.
Supreme Court justices concluded this new Florida counting
system was so arbitrarily varied from county to county
that it denied some Florida voters the equal protection of
the law, guaranteed by the 14th Amendment. In retrospect,
the U.S. Supreme Court action probably prevented the theft
of the election in Florida from occurring......
The US Supreme Court decision over-ruling the Florida Supreme Court had two parts: the first a 7 to 2 vote over-ruling the vote counting system established by the Florida Supreme Court; the second a 5 to 4 vote, requiring the vote count to be concluded almost immediately so that Florida could participate in the Electoral College process.
Had the second decision been 5 to 4 the other way, it is likely that the Florida count would not have been concluded in time for the state to determine a winner and select a slate of electors to the Electoral College. In that case, one of two scenarios would have played out. One is that the Florida legislature, Republican dominated, would have selected the Bush electors to vote in the Electoral College. Alternatively, no Florida electors would have been selected, and neither Bush nor Gore would have won a majority of the Electoral College vote. In that case, the US House of Representatives, voting by states (as in 1824), would have picked Bush since the GOP controlled more state delegations than the Democrats. So even if the 5-4 portion of the U.S. Supreme Court decision had gone the other way, Bush would still have become our President.
With the benefit of hindsight provided by the post-election newspaper recounts, we now know that the charge that the U.S. Supreme Court awarded the election to Bush by stopping the recount, cannot be sustained, even assuming the Florida statewide recount could have been completed in time. These newspaper recounts revealed that had the hand recount of the “undervote” been allowed to be completed statewide, Bush would have won anyway, using almost every consistently applied standard that was considered by the newspapers. Do the Democratic partisans mean to argue that the U.S. Supreme Court was wrong in its 7 to 2 decision to over-rule the Florida Supreme Court? Is it their contention that it should have allowed the enormous inconsistency in the county by county and even individual by individual standards applied to the hand recount that the Florida Supreme Court decision permitted, so long as they produced their desired result? This sounds like a preference for Cook County style graveyard voting, so long as it puts a particular candidate over the top.
It is also worth noting, that with the exception of
Florida, every other state that was decided by less than
1% in the 2000 election went to Gore: New Mexico, Iowa,
Wisconsin, and Oregon. These four states combined had 30
Electoral College votes, 5 more than Florida. While there
were murky circumstances surrounding the Gore victories in
every one of them, the results were not contested by any
Bush “lawyer blitzkrieg” in any of them. In fact, the
Democrats know more about winning close federal elections
than the Republicans, in recent years. In the past five
years, Democrats have won Senate elections in South
Dakota, Nevada and Washington State, by an average margin
of 0.1% of the total vote cast.
The charges of theft in Florida continue to be argued self-righteously by Gore partisans because of his thin national popular vote victory. But there are ample reasons to dispute the contentions, which they weave together in a grand theme of Republican vote suppression:
1. Democrats charge that Florida Governor Jeb Bush
suppressed the black vote (which went over 90% for Gore),
by using police roadblocks on election day to inhibit
voting by blacks, and by clearing the voting rolls of
felons- in an alleged attempt to remove black voters from
the voter lists months before the election. The roadblock
charge, loudly broadcast by race warriors Jesse Jackson
and Al Sharpton, among others, has found zero documentary
evidence to support it, though it is still repeated as if
it were true in black churches and on black-oriented radio
stations.
As for felon votes, Florida law prohibited their voting.
Had Jeb Bush not taken the action he did before the
election, many felons would surely have been able to vote.
It is certainly possible that some names which were purged
from the voter rolls were of individuals mistakenly
identified as felons. But in every election, there are
errors in the voting rolls, and some people wind up not
voting, or more often, have to prove their eligibility at
the polls. If Jeb Bush had been aiming to inhibit a large
black turnout, he surely failed. The percentage of all
votes in Florida in 2000, which were cast by black voters,
was much higher than in previous elections, and the black
turnout percentage, fired up by vicious anti-Bush TV and
radio advertising, may have exceeded the white turnout
percentage.
2. Democrats charge that the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County was designed to confuse voters. This is nonsense. The ballot was designed by a Palm Beach County official who was a loyal Democratic Party member, aiming to make it easier for elderly voters to read the ballot. Sometimes there are unintended consequences when you try to do the right thing. Probably, very few elderly Jewish voters in the county meant to vote for Pat Buchanan for President. But some of them did, and other Palm Beach County voters apparently made a similar mistake.
But the facts of life are that there are no election do-overs for those who make errors when they vote.
3. Democrats charge that many votes for Gore were not counted. Many voters in Florida cast two votes for President (there were about two double votes for each “undervote” in the state). In every state, a vote for two candidates for President disqualifies your vote; and Florida is no exception. So too, with the “undervotes:” if you don’t punch through your punch card ballot completely, the machine won’t read your vote. The machine is politically neutral in kicking out unreadable ballots; the human counters, as was clear during the 37-day process, were not.
It may well be that if no voters had made mistakes, either by voting for Buchanan in Palm Beach County, or casting two votes for President, Gore would have won in Florida. But the vote which counts is the vote that is not spoiled,
not the might-have-been count, had everyone followed
instructions.
4. Some Democrats charge that Fox News called Bush the winner, because the network was in Bush’s pocket. Other networks followed, and Bush was therefore presumed to be the winner once the recount started, giving him a public opinion advantage. This too is revisionist history. All the networks initially called Gore the winner (Fox News included), based on a faulty exit poll by the now-discredited and disbanded Voter News Service, which had been owned collectively by the major TV networks and AP wire service.
When Fox and the other networks changed their call and gave the state to Bush, that was hours later, and lasted only an hour or so, before the Florida popular vote tightened, and the state was reclassified by all the networks as too close to call. Within an hour after that, the Gore lawyers were en route to Tallahassee. If Bush had a public opinion edge nationally during the recount, it was because he was the winner in the popular vote count in the state on election night, as well as after a statewide recount, after military ballots were added, and in each subsequent hand recount in a particular county in the state.
One almost completely ignored story is the fact that when
all the networks gave Florida to Gore soon after the
polls closed in most of the state (the counties in the
Eastern time zone), the polls were still open in the
panhandle area of the state, which is in the Central time
zone. The panhandle was Bush’s strongest area in the
state: the part of Florida that most resembles the rest of
the South. He won by about 2 to 1 in this region. Yet,
there were about 20 minutes remaining to vote in the
Central time zone section of the state, when the networks
called the state for Gore, despite their pledge not to
call a winner in any state while its polls were still
open. But even more important is the fact that every major
network began broadcasting the “fact” that the polls were
closed statewide in Florida, when there was still an hour
left to vote in its Central time zone counties.
A comparison of the county-by-county presidential vote in
Florida in 1996 and 2000 shows that the percentage
increase in turnout was smaller in all the Central time
zone counties, than the increase in voter participation in
the rest of the state. Could this have been caused by the
broadcasters’ premature announcement that the polls were
already closed statewide, when an hour remained to vote in
these Republican leaning counties in the pandhandle? Might
the wrong early call that Gore won the state also have
contributed to the lower-than-expected panhandle turnout?
Had voter participation rates increased in the Florida
panhandle to the same degree as the rest of the state,
Bush might have picked up a net 10,000 votes, if his 2/3
margin in the panhandle held among the missing late
voters. This would have vastly supplemented his final 537
vote margin. In other words, Bush would have won the
state by enough on election night that the 37 day war of
the lawyers would never have occurred.
There is plenty of evidence from previous national elections that were decided early in the evening (1964 for Johnson, 1972 for Nixon, 1984 for Reagan), that turnout on the West Coast was suppressed by the networks’ early call of the presidential race based on Eastern state totals. Many voters in Florida and elsewhere vote at the end of the voting day. Most voting stations allow anyone in line at the scheduled poll closing time to cast their votes. If the polling places were crowded at the end of the day in the panhandle counties, might some voters have chosen to go home, rather than wait in line to vote, after hearing that the presidential race was decided? Might many other potential voters in the Central time zone counties have simply given up on the idea of even going to the polling places, once the incorrect information was broadcast that the polls in the state were already closed?
Not a single network anchor qualified his comment about the polls having closed in Florida, by indicating that they remained open in the Central time zone section of the state. The statistical comparisons of 1996 and 2000 suggest that turnout in the panhandle was significantly suppressed by the false announcement that polls were closed statewide, and by the early call by the networks that Gore had won the state.
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The conclusion from all this is pretty clear. Florida had
a very close election for President in 2000. It was so
close that it was almost a tie. But by every official
count that was made at any time during the 37 day recount
period, and using virtually every consistent method for
counting “undervotes” that was considered after the
election, Bush won Florida and the Presidency. I will say
it again. Bush won Florida. He did not steal it.
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