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Bush v. Gore is ancient history. The results of the 2000 Presidential election in Florida are no longer considered to be an issue by the mainstream press; anyone who brings it up instantly dismissed as a kook, a conspiracy theorist, a somewhat stale joke.
And the inevitable rewriting of history has continued over the years. “Bush won, get over it” is probably the most common response to those who bring up the issue of hanging chads and the recount in Florida. In one critical case, the historical record has actually been erased – and that, in itself, tells us something interesting about the Florida recount.
In 2001 a consortium of newspapers hired an independent team of analysts to go over the ballots; the results have been made available to the public on the world wide web. The viewer selects options from the various counting methods possible and the results are then calculated and presented.
But that offers only a limited view of the possible outcomes of the election in Florida. What might we learn from a bigger picture? I was curious, so back in 2003 I made a chart of the results. He wins in 17 out of 24 scenarios!
Unfortunately the first image can’t be posted. You can view it on a copy of the blog post where I originally posted it; it’s the first image.
But perhaps we should take a more careful look at the data. Are all voting scenarios equally possible?
The answer, actually, is “no”. In 2000, Florida state law required that EVERY ballot which made the intent of the voter clear must be counted: Title IX, Ch. 101.5614.
Ah, but wait! If you clicked on that link, you may be puzzled. “The statute you have selected cannot be found”? What sort of law is that?!? Even the internet archive can’t dig up that page. The (Republican) Florida state legislature has most thoroughly erased any record of that statute.
But of course it’s hard to completely erase anything from the internet. And luckily a reporter captured at least some of the text of that statute:
From Title IX, Ch. 101.5614, Canvass of returns:
If any paper ballot is damaged or defective so that it cannot be counted properly by the automatic tabulating equipment, the ballot shall be counted manually at the counting center by the canvassing board. The totals for all such ballots or ballot cards counted manually shall be added to the totals for the several precincts or election districts. No vote shall be declared invalid or void if there is a clear indication of the intent of the voter [emphasis added] as determined by the canvassing board. After duplicating a ballot, the defective ballot shall be placed in an envelope provided for that purpose, and the duplicate ballot shall be tallied with the other ballots for that precinct.
(Click on image to see clear results)
A number of the disputed votes in the Florida election were “overvotes”, in which a (confused) voter both marked the box next to the name of their candidate and wrote that candidate’s name in. In such a case, the intent of the voter was clearly to vote for that candidate. We must therefore eliminate all scenarios which exclude those valid votes. The result:
This is quite a reversal of fortune! George W. Bush has gone from a 17-7 advantage to a 5-7 disadvantage. Very illuminating. But perhaps an additional look at the data would be appropriate. Is there any other case in which the intent of the voter is clear?
Well yes, there is. Remember those annoying fill-in-the-box standardized tests from school? If you haven’t run across them, optical ballots are basically the same thing. You need to fill in the box completely or else the scanner can’t read them. Unfortunately a number of voters only put a checkmark or a line in the box next to their candidate’s name, but their intent is nonetheless quite clear, and thanks to that darned Title IX, Ch. 101.5614, we must eliminate those choices which do not count those valid votes.
(Click on image to see clear results)
And so:
In all the scenarios in which Florida voting law is obeyed, then, George W. Bush ONLY wins if dimpled chads are counted and the decision of the three judges is unanimous. Since the Bush team itself mocked the very idea of dimpled chads, this at the least places the legitimacy of the election in serious doubt.
[Edit: My thanks to the mysterious benefactor who fixed this post after I gave up on it. Photobucket made it too bleeping hard to get those images up!]
20 Comments
w was going to win Florida by hook or crook, and that’s what happened; jeb had to come through for his brother.
The point is that history is being rewritten to turn a rape into a romance, and the FL legislature is using their power to erase the record.
What does it say about these people that they would change the law so that votes which indicate the intent of the voter don’t have to be counted, and that they’d erase the fact that they’d ever handled things differently?
It says that George Orwell pretty much nailed it.
But of course Bush and Gore were identical so it doesn’t matter. (/dingbat)
As time goes on, I find myself becoming more and more suspicious of the incredibly weak Democratic response to the close result in Florida. Why didn’t the Dems call for a statewide recount instead of a selective recount in specific areas? Certainly the very close total justified a recount of all the ballots in the state. And then there would have been no ammunition for the Republicans on the Supreme Court to render their decision. And as Michael Moore shows in his movie 9/11, why did NOT A SINGLE Democratic Congressperson challenge the final result, as dictated by the Supreme Court?
Correction: the movie is Fahrenheit 911.
Erasing the count all votes law from Florida Statutes will enable Dread Scott and his Rethug Posse to steal THIS election for RMoney.
To this day, I’m mystified that the Justice Department did nothing about Jeb’s purge of African American voters before the election, and did nothing about the Brooks Brothers Riot.
As for Al Gore, his addle-brained decision to put Holy Joe Lieberman on the ticket bit him on the ass big-time during the recount. Lieberman said on TV that all overseas military ballots should be counted whether cast in compliance with state law or not.
Be careful with pronoun use. When I first read that, I didn’t know who “he” was.
There is a Daily Kos Post, [UPDATED] “Experimental” Software Patches In Ohio Voting Machines?+. And the author WFBMM, asks some questions,
No, it is Conspiracy Fact, that software “patches” have been hacked into voting machines of 39 Ohio counties. Daily Kos has systematically suppressed stories about the Diebold/SAIC/Halliburton voting machines. You have to apologize for being a CT, concern troll or conspiracy theorist, when you suggest the obvious, Republicans have been stealing elections for years with computer vote flipping..
Is it a conspiracy theory that the R’s will use computer vote flipping to steal the election. No, oh wait, yes, it is a Conspiracy Theory or CT as they call it at DK. Because the President would never allow that to happen. That is what another DK Post assures us. Obama never betrays his supporters.
Quasit, I enjoyed your post, but I’m curious to know now if the Fla leg has actually repealed the “intent of the voter” standard, or if they’ve just moved it to a new numbered statute.
Also, I think you’ve been lured a little bit into the historical rewriting. The newspaper consortium had only one question to answer –the only question anybody cared about. Who got more legally cast votes. All the baloney about “scenarios” was designed to bury the lede of the resulting story. The review of the overvotes and undervotes proved that Gore got more under the applicable standard — discernable intent! That’s the fact that must be airbrushed out of existence, and pretending that there’s a question about “scenarios” only helps them do it, imho.
caleb36, Gore would have loved to have been able to formally ask for a statewide recount, but there was no such thing under Fla law. Only county level recounts were available. As I recall, you had to first show that the results in the county were within a certain threshold level and if they were you’d be able to get a partial recount of precincts which, if it showed enough discrepancies, could trigger the county wide recount.
Keep in mind, too, the incredible BS storm that the Bushies were able to put up from election day on in their attempt to steal the election that they had failed to steal on and before election day — a BS storm which started with the “call” for Bush after the “uncall” for Gore. (If, as Bush partisans like to say, the media never should have made the Gore call, it follows that the Bush call had even less foundation– and yet how helpful it was to the Bush forces to be able to pretend that he’d “already won” and it was Gore who was trying to “change the result.”) In the face of the BS storm, if Gore had eschewed the only recounts available under Florida law and asked for an “illegal” statewide recount, the Bushies would have had an easy time discrediting him.
I just looked up the current Florida law on counting ballots in a “manual recount.” Title IX section 102.166 (4)(a) says, “A vote for a candidate or ballot measure shall be counted if there is a clear indication on the ballot that the voter has made a definite choice.” Section (4)(b) then gives it to the Dept. of State “to adopt specific rules for each certified voting system prescribing what constitutes a “clear indication on the ballot that the voter has made a definite choice.” It further provides that the DoS rules may not simply require that “the voter must properly mark or designate his or her choice on the ballot” but it also prohibits the DoS from adopting “a catch-all provision that fails to identify specific standards, such as ‘any other mark or indication clearly indicating that the voter has made a definite choice.’”
The “canvassing of returns” section (101.5614) also now contains a reference to DoS rules and the “clear indication” of a “definite choice,” but it also says that “[t]he return printed by the automatic tabulating equipment, to which has been added the return of write-in, absentee, and manually counted votes and votes from provisional ballots, shall constitute the official return of the election upon certification by the canvassing board.”
I think this is true all over the country since 2001 and the Federal law providing funds for changing over to electronic voting machines. After the aborted steal of 2000, they’ve just changed the state laws to say that the the result spit out by the “automatic tabulating equipment” IS the official return. So we’re all relying on the honesty of Diebold and the other equipment makers now.
The Dems are behaving stupidly. In 2000, it was Florida. In 2004, it was Ohio. In 2012, it will be somewhere else. My guess is Wisconsin AND Pennsylvania. With both of those, it is hard to imagine that Obama wins.
Actually, it looks to me like stealing Pa and Wisconsin still wouldn’t quite assure a Rmoney victory. With Ohio, NH, Va and Co, Obama could still get to 270. They’d have to steal Va, or at least NH, too. Plus, a blatant steal of PA is not gonna be accepted by the nation.
One thing they can’t get rid of–or erase–are the ballots themselves. I believe there are 40,000 or so, but they were given to the Library of Congress. Get a Reader’s Card and go look at them, if you like. They can re-write and say whatever they like, but the evidence is still available.
It’s not that they were identical, it’s the fact that both sucked up to the oligarchs. Gore, at the time, was a DLC’er. It took the Bush years to discredit the DLC, though plenty of them are still polluting our politics.
Frank – I’m a programmer/developer who works on oracle systems.
software patches/upgrades are never applied to a ‘live’ production system without first running through the gamut of testing on test databases, this is highly unusual that these “patches” are being applied to actual real-time voting machines. Sen. Nina Turner brought this matter up on “The Ed Show” last night.
I thought the clear intent of the voter was not always obvious in ballots during the recount? Wasn’t that why we heard so much about things like hanging chads, dimpled chads, etc?
You heard so much about hanging chads because one side (the one with the most control over the media) wanted to discredit and then stop the recount.
From the media consortium report we learned that Gore’s margin of victory actually came from the “overvotes.” That is, the ballots that were erroneously rejected by the scanners. The review they conducted of all the rejected ballots, both overvotes and undervotes, found that there were thousands among them — enough to give Gore a clear victory — that clearly showed the “intent of the voter” to vote under all of the recognized interpretations of that standard. In other words, you don’t have to count any dimpled chads to find that Gore won. Even if you only count the clearly cast, legal but erroneously rejected ballots — such as the ones where the voter filled in the oval for Pres, and then wrote in the name of his or her choice — Gore got more.
And the state court in Tallahassee was about to start a review of all of the rejected ballots on December 10, 2000. That’s why fat Tony the fixer had to stop the count, famously writing in the injunction he issued that day that the count must be stopped because any further counting of ballots would “cast a cloud” upon W’s “claim to have won the election.”
I love computers, they can be friendly sometimes. But Godel’s Theorem still applies, anything that can be hacked, will be hacked.
The ownership of these godawful devices remains obscure. The software is very very proprietary, but is some sort of Bill Gates OS, which means more back doors than a CIA Safehouse.. And a flash drive with wireless can be used to make your computer voting machine produce any result.
I reserve the right to error on the side of paranoia when it comes to Republicans or Democrats stealing elections. But see the comments at Daily Kos. Many say, “nothing to see here, move along”.
I already voted, WITH A PAPER BALLOT.