Bush Won Florida in 2000

On August 5, I wrote,

http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2005/08/05/comparing-our-troubles-to-theirs/

Myth has it that if the recount had been allowed to continue, Gore would have won. The NY Times and the Miami Herald (both of which endorsed Gore) conducted an exhaustive recount, at a cost of many thousands of dollars, extending over a period of several months. They issued a detailed, five-part report, which took up the entire front page of the Herald for five days in a row, as well as many inside pages.

Today, Sholom Simon commented there:

Not exactly. See the results at www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl – under articles. There were nine hypothetical recount scenarios. The three recounts that had been most widely discussed during the battle of Florida, including the partial recount requested by the Gore campaign and two interpretations of the Florida Supreme Court order, would have given the vote to Bush.

Which is exactly what I said. If the recount had been allowed to continue and had not been stopped by the US Supreme Court, Bush would still have won.

I went to the site mentioned by Sholom Simon and saw that under some of its scenarios, attempts were made to divine the intentions of voters who inadvertently spoiled their ballots, by overvoting or otherwise messing up. Mind-reading is not acceptable under any system of law, however, and would not have been part of the recount even under the most liberal Florida Supreme Court rules.

But if you do want to include mind-reading, you have to include thousands of Bush votes that were not cast in the Florida Panhandle because all three major TV networks mistakenly (on purpose?) reported that the polls were closed, an hour before the polls really did close in the heavily Republican Panhandle.

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3 Responses

  1. DMZ says:

    Could we PLEASE get off this entire stupid subject? It has absolutely nothing to do with Orthodox Judaism whatsoever, and frankly is pretty whiny no matter what side you take. There are many, many politics blogs for you to rehash this stuff out on. Please don’t screw this one up doing it.

    -DMZ

  2. Sholom Simon says:

    You are misleading again. You wrote: “Mind-reading is not acceptable under any system of law, however, and would not have been part of the recount even under the most liberal Florida Supreme Court rules.”

    Tell me: if a person punched out the hole next to “Gore” and then punched out a hole next to “Write In”, and then wrote in “Gore” — it is not mindreading to discern the voter’s intentions.

    I urge all readers who care to inform themselves to check out http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl – under articles. Note, this is the very source Toby cited.

  3. Toby Katz says:

    to #1: I happen to think that politics IS very important to us as Jews living in America, but if you don’t find certain posts interesting, please feel free to skip them and read the ones that do interest you. I don’t plan to write about politics often and only wrote this one because someone else on c-c had trotted out that tired old line about the “stolen” election.

    to #2: the site I linked to was not mine, but Paul Krugman’s, and is actually pretty useless. It is not based on the original 2001 report of the NY Times, which counted every single ballot that could possibly have been legally counted (and described in exhaustive detail how that was determined) — and concluded that if the second recount had not been stopped by the US Supreme Court, Bush still would have won. I remind you that the NY Times endorsed Al-gore and did not WANT to find Bush the legal winner.

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