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Buried truth of a flawed election
<http://www.msnbc.com/news/656430.asp>
Florida votes, media spins, and a troubled world turns
By Eric Alterman
MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR
NEW YORK, Nov. 12 You would never know it from the confused, pre-crash
coverage in the nation's elite media Monday morning, but Al Gore beat
George Bush in Florida by almost every vote-counting standard save the one
that the Gore team managed to choose. This is consistent with the
Democratic candidate's hapless campaign. The Supreme Court did not have to
take the election away from Al Gore: he and his campaign gave it away
themselves. And in doing so, they helped George W. Bush and his minions
undermine American democracy.
MOST OF MONDAY'S headlines reporting the much-delayed results of the
$900,000 study of more than 175,000 votes conducted for a consortium of
eight news organizations by the University of Chicago's National Opinion
Research Center (NORC) focus on the fact that when the Supreme Court issued
its 5-4 decision handing the election to Bush going so far as to
reinterpret the law and refusing to allow its decision to be held as
precedent they were operating under a vote-counting scenario under which
Bush would have prevailed. Indeed, Gore attorney David Boies, speaking
before the court, explicitly ruled out a more inclusive recount of
Florida's votes that not only would have elected his man, but would have
been immeasurably more fair to the people of Florida who had a right to
have their voices heard in determining their state's choice for president.
Boies asked the Supreme Court to count "undervotes" but not "overvotes."
Leave it to Al Gore to pick a legal team that fights tooth and nail against
his best interests.
BURIED TRUTH
But buried beneath the deliberately misleading headlines on Monday is the
inescapable fact that Al Gore was the genuine choice of a miniscule
majority of Florida's voters as well as the victor by more than 540,000
votes nationally. On the other hand, George Bush would have won a recount
using the "undercount only" scenario and so the Supreme Court majority that
labored so torturously to hand Bush his "victory" dishonored itself for
nothing. Al Gore professed a public desire to have Florida "count all the
votes," but he never instructed his lawyers to demand the recount of all
votes in all 67 counties that would have revealed his victory. (The award
for most egregious misrepresentation goes to CNN.com for its headline that
the results "showed George Bush winning even with a statewide recount." It
showed nothing of the sort.)
Gore would also have won if Florida had managed to include the 113,000
ballots deemed to be spoiled by so-called "overvotes." Of these, more than
75,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate and just 29,000 chose Bush. Common
sense demands that we admit that most of these voters were not supporters
of either Patrick Buchanan or the Socialist Workers' Party. Again, Gore is
the winner here by a significant majority. Moreover many overvotes were
entirely legal. They simply weren't counted because a voter may have
punched in Gore's name AND written it down to be certain the counter got
the message. Gore never asked that these votes be counted, either.
MORE VOTES FOR GORE
As the Associated Press report put it, "In the review of all the state's
disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all
undervotes and overvotes statewide." In other words, he got more votes than
George Bush. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a
loose-counting scenario. He won if you count "hanging chads" and he won if
you counted a "dimpled chad." He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in
the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot the so-called
"Palm Beach" standard. He even won if you counted only a fully-punched
chad. He won if you counted partially filled oval on an optical scan and he
won if you counted only a fully-filled optical scan. He won if you fairly
counted the absentee ballots. No matter how you count it, if everyone who
legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote matter, Al Gore
would be sitting in the Oval Office today.
Of course these facts are of only academic interest. George Bush has been
sworn in as president and the United States is at war and the media is not
much interested in determining the democratic intent of the voters in an
election already consigned to history. White House press secretary Ari
Fleischer called the results "superfluous," adding, "The voters settled
this election last fall, and the nation moved on a long time ago." Much of
the national media apparently concurs. Indeed, they concurred even during
the Florida recount. James A. Baker declared victory on behalf of his
client, George W. Bush, on the basis of a faulty vote count and the media
considered the rest of the story to be hardly more than wishful thinking
and possibly self-hypnosis on the part of the Gore team. The narrative
enjoyed a few interruptions of course, and required not only the Supreme
Court to sustain it, but also what Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal
termed a "bourgeois riot" by Republican operatives in Palm Beach county to
shut down a vote that looked like it might go Gore's way. But it held.
PATRIOTIC DUTY?
One always had the impression that the major news outlets were reluctant to
report the study in such a way that it injured Bush's shaky legitimacy.
After Sept. 11, many seemed to feel it was their patriotic duty not to do
anything to call into question the authority of the
commander-in-chief. New York Times political reporter Richard Berke
admitted as much when he wrote in his newspaper shortly after the attack
that the NORC report on Florida now seemed "utterly irrelevant" and, had it
been released too close to the World Trade Center attacks, "might have
stoked the partisan tensions."
Obviously, those worries were for naught. The horrific crash of the
American Airlines jetliner in Queens today ensures that even this study
will receive next to no attention. But the ultimate price will not be
insignificant. As recently as last week, according to the Gallup
Organization, nearly half of Americans surveyed remain convinced that
President Bush either "won on a technicality" or "stole the election." Even
so, during the past year, the U.S. political system has produced virtually
nothing to repair an antiquated election system that spends billions for
advertising and almost nothing for accuracy. And in the election of --2000,
it put the wrong man in the White House.
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Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor to
MSNBC.com.
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