A couple of weeks after the 2000 presidential election I was talking to a nurse in my doctor’s office. The nurse, a very bright young black lady told me that her vote had not been counted. I ask her how she knew that. “Oh, I know,” she said without revealing how she knew. Not wanting to cruise on that sea of invincible ignorance I let the subject drop. Her vote among the tens of thousands counted in Palm Beach County simply hadn’t been counted. She knew that. That was it.
It was also the first hint I had that a monstrous lie was being propagated – a myth that would become a mainstay of Democrat propaganda just as the Herbert Hoover myth was dredged up in presidential campaigns for many years after. Democrats ran against Hoover, just as they are now running against the GOP and the U.S. Supreme Court for allegedly stealing the 2000 election from the sainted Al Gore.
You hear it at just about every gathering of disgruntled Democrats. Terry McAuliffe, the Dem’s national chairman can’t open his mouth without charging that President Bush stole the election. In California he cited that claim as proof that when the Republicans can’t win an election honestly, they steal it, as they were doing, he charged, in starting a recall movement to get rid of the recently re-elected Governor Gray Davis.
This from the head of a party that has been notorious for dealing in election frauds. In 1960 it was abundantly clear that fraud played a major part in the election of John F. Kennedy, especially in Illinois where the late Mayor Daley manipulated the results in Cook County to counter downstate Republican votes. After the 1960 election I was told by a South Carolina Democrat congressman that “You Republicans are going to have to learn that you have to win big. Otherwise we’ll steal it from you.”
That’s what they tried in 2000, and when they failed, they began to cry foul and they haven’t stopped since. They are outraged that they were not allowed to do what they do best: steal elections.
On election night, or rather the morning after, Gore and his crew realized that the results in Florida were neck and neck. Gore had already conceded in a phone call to Bush but one of his campaign aides, Michael Whouley, made a frantic call to campaign boss Bill Daley and told him “This thing’s going to automatic recount.” That was the beginning. Shortly afterward, Gore called Bush and recanted his earlier concession. A team was assembled to plot strategy for challenging Bush’s unofficial narrow, almost-600 vote, victory.
By 6:30 a.m. 75 Gore operatives were on their way to Florida. Daley was pessimistic. He recalled for the Washington Post that he believed that if you recounted votes, both candidates would gain some and lose some, and ultimately nothing much would change.
He wasn’t alone in that opinion. On the plane were three men, Timothy Downs, Chris Sautter and John Hardin Young. who had written the definitive book on recounts “The Recount Primer.” As the Washington Post reported in a remarkable and even-handed series on the aftermath of the 2000 election in Florida, “A Wild Ride Into Uncharted Territory” they tore pages from their book and copied them using two airborne fax machines.
What they said, in their book was that “If a candidate is behind, the scope should be as broad as possible, and the rules should be different from those used election night.” In other words, Young said, “It’s the end of the fourth quarter. When you’re behind, a recount is a Hail Mary. The one who is behind has to gather votes.”
That said it all. In essence, where you didn’t have the votes you needed you had to create them by expanding the “universe of possible votes. Seek to examine all the ballots rejected by the machines because no vote registered, the “undervotes.” All the paper ballots rejected because they weren’t filled out precisely right – look at those, too. Ballots marked twice because they were confusing to some voters – the “overvotes” – look at those.
“You get 2,000 pitches, you get a better chance of having homers,” Young said.
Essentially, what they had concluded in the very beginning was that they were fighting a losing battle they could only win by some very creative bookkeeping, by turning clearly uncountable votes into countable ones.
As the Post reported “Flip a few pages ahead in the primer where it advises that the county election boards may never have done a recount before. “Get there first, and become their friendly experts. Figure out the counting standards that will favor your candidate, then generously apply them to every vote, no matter what.”
“That’s why the Gore team swept down in such force so quickly, and why they hoped no one would notice.”
A case in point was the Gore forces dishonest attempt to use the infamous “butterfly ballot'” as proof of the GOP’s election rigging. The ballot Palm Beach County elections supervisor Theresa LePore designed was meant to help the thousands of elderly voters who could not read small type, which type would have otherwise been necessary because of the size of the ballot.
The Post explained that LaPore chose a design “which placed the names on two facing pages, with the punch holes running down the center. Arrows pointed from the names to the holes-but when the ballot cards were fed into the voting machines, the holes didn’t always line up with the arrows. Not that the arrows were entirely clear, either: The hole for a minor third-party candidate, Patrick J. Buchanan, was higher on the card than the hole for Al Gore.
“Thanks to the two wing-like pages, this would come to be known as the “butterfly ballot.” LePore considered it a rather lovely solution to a difficult problem.”
Despite the fact that the ballot had been shown before the election to the major party county chairmen and to campaign officials for every candidate and not one had objected, the Gore forces, aided by the media, charged that the ballot everybody had seen and approved of beforehand, was now unfair.
Every attempt was made to count votes that clearly were not votes in the four heavily Democrat counties where Gore was challenging the results, and in the end, just as Daley had predicted, nothing had really changed. At this point the Gore forces tried to use to Florida courts to help them find votes where they weren’t any. In the end, the Democrat controlled Florida Supreme Court decided to thwart the state’s own election laws – an attempt to call for a statewide recount which was later condemned by the court’s own chief justice .
The Bush team argued that the Florida court had usurped the power of the state legislature by fashioning new rules for counting and certifying the votes and that “the use of arbitrary, standardless, and selective manual recounts” violated the equal protection and due process clauses of the Constitution.
The hasty statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Count was an invitation to sheer chaos. It would involve dozens of counties devising their own standards for discerning votes. By order of the court, for example, about 20 percent of the Miami-Dade ballots would be certified according to the county canvassing board’s partial count, while the rest of the Miami undervotes were to be counted in Tallahassee by an entirely different group of judges with its own set of standards.
The U.S. Supreme slapped down the Florida Supreme Court’s attempt to aid Gore to continue his fruitless search for votes in a chaotic statewide recount that set no standards for counting.
In a seven-to-two per curiam ruling the Supreme Court refused to allow the recounting to run until December 18th, when the presidential electors were to meet to cast their votes, in contradiction to Florida law and ordered that it cease on December 12. That did it.
The idea that the so called conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court had unjustly handed the election to George Bush completely ignores the biased Florida Supreme Court rulings them high court struck down that would have violated Florida election law, and in the end, would not have given Gore a victory anyway, as studies have shown to be the case.
On November 12, a group of major US media organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN, released the results of a 10-month investigation into disputed votes cast in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.
Included in that group were such ultra liberal media outlets as the Tribune Co. (owner of the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune and Orlando Sentinel), the St. Petersburg Times and the Palm Beach Postas well as the Associated Press. They based their conclusions on a review of 175,010 contested ballots conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC), a nonprofit survey firm affiliated with the University of Chicago retained by the group.
Their report insisted that George Bush would have won the election in Florida—by 493 votes—even if the US Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and that Bush would have won by 225 votes if recounts had been completed in the four Florida counties where Gore sought them.
The media group stated that it was their conclusion that the U.S. Supreme Court ruling halting the statewide counting of disputed ballots did not determine the outcome of the presidential election.
Said the New York Times, no friend of Republicans or George Bush “[T]he findings indicate that the Supreme Court din’t steal the presidential election from Mr. Gore.”
The most thorough analysis of the election in Florida was conducted by the non-partisan Judicial Watch (JW) organization. JW reported that just three days after the election on November 7, 2000, they invoked Florida’s “Sunshine Laws” to get access to the presidential ballots. Following Judicial Watch’s lead, media organizations also sought access several weeks later. As the election results were being litigated by representatives of both the Democratic and Republican parties, Judicial Watch saw the need for an independent, non-partisan analysis of the ballots at issue and the process used to count those ballots.
They hired the accounting firm of Johnson, Lambert & Co., a firm with expertise not only in the counting of ballots, but in the detection of fraud. They immediately found problems in some of the key counties such as Palm Beach County where they found discrepancies in the numbers produced by County officials, who simply could not reconcile the results of each of their counts in the days after the election. In Broward County, they discovered that Broward County officials changed standards as they recounted ballots, lost track of ballots, and had no consistency in how they awarded votes to individual candidates.
It became clear that the canvassing boards in these counties simply lacked either the desire or expertise necessary to conduct a trustworthy recount. Of primary importance is that, after analyzing 42,724 of the 62,605 ballots reported as undervotes in Florida, it is the stated view of the independent accounting firm that a statewide recount of the Florida undervotes would not have changed the outcome of the presidential election.
According to JW, the auditors found that the counties’ procedures resulted in numbers that were unverifiable. For instance, in Palm Beach, they learned that Palm Beach officials wrongly awarded at least 62 votes to Mr. Gore that should have gone to Mr. Bush. In Broward County, in the middle of the recount process, officials changed to a new, more liberal standard for adjudicating ballots. This change in standards in the middle of the recount may have worked to Mr. Gore’s benefit.
Judicial Watch noted that the simple act of recounting affected the characteristics of the voting cards, causing additional chads to fall off. As for the “dimple mystery,” Judicial Watch used a sample voting machine and ballots from Broward County in an attempt to test how the observed dimples there were created. They could not recreate, using the machine, the types of dimples seen on many of the Broward County ballots. These unexplained dimples raise the specter that the dimples were created by someone other than a voter.
Had the counting continued Bush lawyer Ben Ginsberg said.. “I think we would have stayed ahead. But the more arguing there was over ballots that were standardless, the messier it was and the more chaotic it was. That’s really not how you want the presidency of the United States decided.”
Wrote the Post: “The Supreme Court’s decision to stay the counting prevented that possibility from developing.”
The myth that the U.S. Supreme Court chose George Bush is a lie, provable by the facts noted above. The truth is that the Gore forces were stymied in an attempt some of them knew from the beginning would fail, as indeed it did. And for that, they will never forgive the Court or President Bush.
And that’s the truth about the 2000 election.