Thursday, July 08, 2004

Let’s get one thing perfectly clear - President Bush won the 2000 election. Yes, Al Gore won the popular vote, but we don’t have a strict democracy, we have a democratic republic form of government. Therefore, the electoral college is put in play. George W. Bush won the electoral college.

Regarding the recounts in Florida that the US Supreme Court stopped? No, they did not “appoint” Bush as President. They stopped a procedure that they deemed to be illegal - that’s what they do. But back to the recounts. The mainstream media did an excellent job of burying the news that several news organizations continued the recounts, just to see what would have resulted. Turns out that they found that President Bush would have won Florida after all. (Please note to whom I link - it’s CNN, hardly a bastion of Republicanism in the media.)

Study reveals flaws in ballots, voter errors may have cost Gore victory

WASHINGTON (CNN)—A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W. Bush would still have been elected president.

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago conducted the six-month study for a consortium of eight news media companies, including CNN.

NORC dispatched an army of trained investigators to examine closely every rejected ballot in all 67 Florida counties, including handwritten and punch-card ballots. The NORC team of coders were able to examine about 99 percent of them, but county officials were unable to deliver as many as 2,200 problem ballots to NORC investigators. In addition, the uncertainties of human judgment, combined with some counties’ inability to produce the same undervotes and overvotes that they saw last year, create a margin of error that makes the study instructive but not definitive in its findings.

As well as attempting to discern voter intent in ballots that might have been re-examined had the recount gone forward, the study also looked at the possible effect of poor ballot design, voter error and malfunctioning machines. That secondary analysis suggests that more Florida voters may have gone to the polls intending to vote for Democrat Al Gore but failed to cast a valid vote.

In releasing the report, the consortium said it is in no way trying to rewrite history or challenge the official result—that Bush won Florida by 537 votes. Rather it is simply trying to bring some additional clarity to one of the most confusing chapters in U.S. politics.

Additional Links: ABCNews.com
Florida Ballot Project
Slate