The Recount

It will come as no surprise to readers of The Dubya Report that a statewide recount of ballots cast in the 2000 presidential election, using what a majority of Florida counties said they would use as a standard of voter intent, would have given Al Gore a majority. This is one of the conclusions reached by the massive analysis of Florida ballots conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University Chicago. The study, whose results were released November 11, was funded by a consortium of U.S. news organizations including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and Tribune Publishing which owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and several newspapers in Florida. The release of the study's results, available since early September, was delayed at the request of the consortium following the September 11 terrorist attacks, according to an NORC staffer. With few exceptions the mainstream news media reported the results as if they demonstrated that the Supreme Court's unprecedented intervention into the electoral process, which awarded Bush the presidency, merely validated the will of the Florida voters. The New York Times announced the results with the headline, "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote." While true in the narrow sense that the limited recount that was interrupted by the Supreme Court would, according the the NORC, have awarded a majority of votes to Bush, these conclusions suffer from the fallacy of questionable cause. They ignore the chain of events that that led to Bush v. Gore coming before the Supreme Court in the first place. They also ignore the fact that the court decision ensured that "further legal challenges [would] not again change the trajectory of the battle." Florida Circuit Judge Terry Lewis, under whose auspices the recount was taking place, told the Orlando Sentinel that, had the recount gone forward, he might have ordered all counties to count overvotes. The NORC study demonstrated that under that scenario, and four others, Gore would have won.

The Gore team's consistent mantra was to "count every vote." Gore's lawyers concluded that they were unlikely under Florida law to succeed in suing for a statewide recount. Gore advisors were also concerned, at the time, to avoid being seen as trying to circumvent democracy through the courts. So rather than go to court about it, Gore proposed a full recount to Bush, who immediately rejected it. Had the full statewide recount that Gore advocated taken place, Gore would have won, according to the NORC. "If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won ...," the Times said.

Another area in which concern for public relations prevented the Gore team from pursuing what would have been a fruitful strategy concerns absentee ballots. As noted in Jake Tapper's Down & Dirty, Republican operatives executed a concerted plan to encourage the filing of absentee ballots by likely Republican voters, even if they arrived after the legal deadline. This was confirmed by a New York Times study published in July, which found 680 absentee ballots arriving after Election Day were counted, in violation of Florida state law. Operating inside Katherine Harris's offices, Republican consultants developed detailed instructions for county canvassing boards that would ensure that the greatest number of absentee ballots likely to favor Bush were accepted. Bush campaign officials in Washington enlisted the help of the Pentagon in expediting collection and delivery of military ballots. Republicans on the House Armed Services committee helped the campaign obtain private contact information for voters in the military.

The earlier Times investigation found that the absentee ballots were "were judged by markedly different standards, depending on where they were counted." This was in conflict with statements by the Bush campaign and Florida secretary of state Katherine Harris that uniform standards should be applied, and not changed in the middle of the contest. It also runs counter to the equal-protection guarantee cited by the Supreme Court when it stopped the statewide manual recount.

In predominantly Republican counties Bush lawyers urged officials to ignore Florida election rules, particularly those requiring that ballots be postmarked by Election Day. They made speeches deriding Gore lawyers for suggesting voter fraud, while reminding listeners of the right of military men and women to vote. Fred Tarrant, a Republican City Council member from Naples, Fla., told the Collier County canvassing board "If they catch a bullet, or fragment from a terrorist bomb, that fragment does not have any postmark or registration of any kind." In Santa Rosa county a Bush lawyer told the canvassing board that they faced prosecution and jail time if they rejected overseas ballots. Judge Anne Kaylor, chair of the Polk County canvassing board acknowledged that the pressure tactics worked, and that invalid ballots were counted. "Technically, they were not supposed to be accepted. Any canvassing board that says they weren't under pressure is being less than candid."

Meanwhile, in predominantly Democratic areas, Bush lawyers objected to the slightest flaws, including incomplete addresses, and signatures that were illegible or varied slightly from voter rolls.

The NORC study determined that if all counties had adhered to Florida election law when accepting absentee ballots, Gore would have picked up 290 additional votes -- enough to win under some scenarios. The Gore team chose not to challenge absentee ballots, many of which were from members of the military, because "Mr. Gore did not want to be accused of seeking to invalidate votes of men and women in uniform."

An election correction