To plexys69:
"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."
However, if you read further from one of YOUR sources:
"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....."
".....Out of Palm Beach County emerged one of the least restrictive standards for determining a valid punch-card ballot. The county elections board determined that a chad hanging by up to two corners was valid and that a dimple or a chad detached in only one corner could also count if there were similar marks in other races on the same ballot. If that standard had been adopted statewide, the study shows a slim, 42-vote margin for Gore....."
".....In addition to undervotes, thousands of ballots in the Florida presidential election were invalidated because they had too many marks. This happened, for example, when a voter correctly marked a candidate and also wrote in that candidate's name. The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes....."
".....According to the study, 5,277 voters made a clean punch for Gore and a clean punch for Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, candidates whose political philosophies are poles apart. An additional 1,650 voters made clean punches for Bush and Buchanan. If many of the Buchanan votes were in error brought on by a badly designed ballot, a CNN analysis found that Gore could have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush....."
".....Eighteen other counties used another confusing ballot design known as the "caterpillar" or "broken" ballot, where six or seven presidential candidates are listed in one column and the names of the remaining minor party candidates appeared at the top of a second one. According to the study, more than 15,000 people who voted for either Gore or Bush also selected one candidate in the second column, apparently thinking the second column represented a new race....."
".....Had many of these voters not marked a minor candidate in the second column, Gore would have netted thousands of additional votes as compared with Bush....."
".....On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast....."
Let's not forget that hand recounts and "dimpled chad" were signed into Texas law by Governor Bush, yet they were deemed unworthy in Florida.....the mandatory machine recounts were not performed in 18 of the 67 Florida counties (these 18 counties only retabulated the machine memory cards).....an estimated 20,000 potential voters were "purged" from the polls by Katherine Harris.....not one "recount county" used the same counting standards, and Dade was "forced" to abandon the recount due to unruly protests.....and the SCOTUS overturned a state decision--and wrote a landmark decision that counted "only once"--going against all that is holy to the right-wing GOP (state control over Federal intervention).
None of the NORC's findings were conclusive, and I'm not saying Gore won. Florida--whether you supported Bush or Gore--was a legal and partisan nightmare.
But I am saying you should read your sources through before you footnote them.
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