arch/ive/ief (2000 - 2005)

At least four newspapers-- the Washington Post, the Orlando Sentinel, Palm Beach Post, and the Guardian of London-- have reported data indicating that Bush received less votes than Al Gore in Florida.

It is becoming clearer that Bush lost, as the tabulation of uncounted ballots continues. The Supreme Court of the United States stopped the tabulation of uncounted votes, or so-called “undervotes”, votes which are not registered by the machine. Florida law clearly allowed for such votes to be counted, and the Bush campaign did accept the counts of about 140 previously untabulated votes in six Florida counties, which were put into the Bush column. Democrats were denied the opportunity to have all untabulated votes counted.

Under Florida law the “intent of the voter” is the standard, which can be determined by the presence of indentations in the ballot. Such a standard is acceptable in 33 states in the union, including Florida and Texas. While the Bush v. Gore case was being hotly debated nationwide, a count of untabulated votes was demanded by a Republican in Smith County, Texas. The ballots were recounted for the local election, and the results showed that the Republican had won the election. Indented ballots (or ballots containing the so-called “indented chads”) were counted, per Texas State Law, signed by G.W.Bush. No Republican or Democrat complained that counting such ballots was a “violation of equal protection”.

The evidence is mounting of a Bush loss:

1) The Orlando Sentinel reported that Bush fell behind Gore by over four hundred votes in the total statewide count, based on the results of the new tabulations in Lake and Broward Counties.

2) The Guardian of London printed a story revealing that recounts in Hillsborough and several other counties put Bush behind in Florida.

3) The Washington Post earlier this month reported that Gore beat Bush based solely on the results of recent tabulations in Orange County and 16 other counties where paper ballots were used.

4) The Palm Beach Post reports that, based only on the tabulated results in Palm Beach County of indented ballots, Bush lost statewide by over 150 votes.

So far, no news agency,corporate controlled network or newspaper has put all these facts together and come to the obvious conclusion: Bush’s Presidency is illegitimate.

Some public figures are beginning to murmur. Yesterday, one Florida Congressman dared --- during a hearing about “Why the Networks erred on Election Night” --- to say that the real issue was NOT the networks. He suggested that Congress should be investigating why the votes of thousands of blacks were not counted. James Carville has even dared to suggest that Bush did not win in Florida, based on the results the retabulations. A few pebbles are beginning to roll: the result could be an avalanche of discontent, as the public becomes more and more aware of the fact that Bush definitely DID NOT receive the majority of votes in Florida.

Read the Palm Beach Post’s article on Bush’s Loss.

Election 2000: Bush Actually Lost

• More on the Florida Vote

By Joel Engelhardt, Scott McCabe
and Christine Stapleton
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers

Saturday, Jan. 27

WEST PALM BEACH -- If Democrats
had gotten their way and dimpled
ballots in Palm Beach County had
been counted as votes, Al Gore
would have picked up 682 votes,
which is more than President
George W. Bush's 537-vote
statewide margin of victory,
according toThe Palm Beach Post's
examination of disputed ballots.

Additionally, the analysis shows that
more than two-thirds of the
disputed ballots were cast on Data
Punch voting machines even though
those machines accounted for less
than one-third of the 462,644
ballots cast in the county.

Democrats said the numbers justify
their belief that Al Gore should
have won Florida. Republicans scoff,
saying the U.S. Supreme Court made
it clear that the disputed, dimpled
ballots should not count.

Of the 14,500 ballots that the Palm
Beach County Canvassing Board
examined in November, the 4,513
under-votes reviewed this month
by The Post are the ones where the
board decided no vote had been
cast but Democratic or GOP
observers disagreed. The board set
those ballots aside for possible
court review, but no court did, from
the circuit level in Tallahassee to
the U.S. Supreme Court in
Washington.

Of the disputed ballots, 2,500 had
marks -- some faint, some heavy,
some with holes but most without
-- for Gore. Those with similar
marks for Bush numbered 1,818.

That 682-vote gain for Gore would
have been in addition to his
174-vote gain found during Palm
Beach County's 10-day hand
recount. Those results, submitted
after the 5 p.m. Nov. 26 deadline,
were not accepted by Florida's
secretary of state in the certified
537-vote Bush victory.

The Post also found that the
precincts with the most disputed
under-votes were not those with a
majority of black or elderly voters.
They were not particularly
Democrat or Republican. But they
were overwhelmingly Data Punch.

Of the disputed under-votes cast at
polling places (as opposed to those
cast by absentee voters), 67.8
percent were cast on the Data
Punch machines, which are newer
and less costly than the county's
other type of punch-card voting
machine, the Votomatic.

While Republicans argued that
many voters may have touched the
ballot with the stylus, leaving a
dimple, before deciding not to vote
for president, mechanical
engineering tests commissioned by
The Post this month found that it's
slightly harder to punch out a chad
in a Data Punch machine.

Supervisor of Elections Theresa
LePore, a canvassing board
member, said she has not yet had
time to study the error-rate in Data
Punch machines. However, she said,
"There appears to be some kind of a
problem with ballots in those
machines."

She said she would not use Data
Punch machines in the March 13
municipal elections, and unless the
ballot is crowded, voters would not
be asked to punch the first column,
in which the presidential votes
were cast. She said those decisions
were not colored by the machine's
record during the presidential
election.

County Court Judge Charles Burton,
another canvassing board member,
said he saw more dimples in the
first column than elsewhere on the
ballot among the 14,500 ballots he
reviewed. Democrats argued in
court that the mechanics of the
machine, combined with the heavy
use of the first column, made it
harder to punch out a chad there.

The Post's tests of machines,
conducted by a Florida Atlantic
University mechanical engineering
professor, found chads dislodge
more easily from the center of the
ballot than they do along the top,
bottom and sides.

Nearly 44 percent of the registered
voters in the Data Punch precincts
that produced disputed ballots are
Democrats and about 36 percent
are Republican. Most are white --
90.2 percent. And less than half --
40.2 percent -- are older than 64.

While about half of the under-votes
and over-votes cast in Palm Beach
County came from precincts that
are majority elderly or black, only
two of the 10 precincts with the
most disputed ballots are majority
elderly and none is majority black.

LePore questioned the validity of
the ballot review, for which she is
charging $125 an hour. Aside from
The Post, reviews are being
conducted by The Miami Herald, the
Republican Party of Florida and
Judicial Watch, a conservative
governmental watchdog group.

She said she doubted any true count
can be accomplished without
examining all ballots cast on
Election Day "because you don't
know what the machine counted for
those."

LePore directed the hand recount
of those ballots in November, and
none of the media groups plans to
review all of them again.

Additionally, every group is
applying its own criteria and its
employees exhibit various levels of
interest, LePore said.

"You got different people looking
at different criteria there," said
LePore. "They're not writing down
the same thing. Some are not even
looking at the cards. They're
yawning, talking on cell phones. I
think it's unfair to put out any
numbers that are inaccurate."

Additional reviews are planned or
under way throughout the state. A
consortium that includes The Post,
The Wall Street Journal and The
New York Times will soon begin
looking at the under-votes and
over-votes in all of Florida's 67
counties.

The Miami Herald and USA Today
are conducting a similar review.

The media results are almost
certain to differ because of varying
judgments by reviewers and human
error. Furthermore, experts say no
count -- whether by hand or
machine -- will ever be 100
percent certain. Computer industry
consultants estimate the error rate
for counting punch cards could run
as high as 1 percent and varies with
the number of times the cards are
handled.

Palm Beach County's ballots
underwent three machine recounts,
one hand recount and a sample
hand recount of four precincts. The
results varied every time.

During the hand recount, the
canvassing board converted about
1,000 under-votes into votes, most
of them for Bush or Gore. That left
9,251 under-votes. The Palm Beach
Post is continuing to review the
remaining 4,600 under-votes as
well as the 19,235 over-votes --
ballots in which votes were cast for
more than one presidential
candidate.

In the 37-day election contest of
Florida election results, Gore had
hoped to find a mother lode of
votes in heavily Democratic South
Florida to overtake Bush. A manual
recount in Broward County added
567 votes for Gore.

The Palm Beach County hand count,
if it had been done on time, would
have added another 174 for Gore.

Democratic efforts to get a hand
recount in Miami-Dade County
were stymied. The Post's review of
under-votes there, also completed
this month, showed a net gain of six
votes for Bush if all the dimpled
ballots had been counted. While
Miami-Dade recorded 10,600
under-votes, few were caused by
dimpled ballots. The Post recorded
just 350 dimpled ballots and
another 87 with hanging, or
partially dislodged, chad.

Just a week after Bush took the
oath of office, The Post's findings
caused consternation in Republican
circles.

The disputed ballots carried a heavy
Democratic tilt, because
Republicans initially did not object
when dimples for Bush were ruled
as under-votes, said Mark Wallace,
a Miami lawyer who observed the
Palm Beach County recount for
Bush.

Since Republicans argued dimples
shouldn't count they believed it
would be hypocritical to object,
Wallace explained. Ultimately, they
chided the Democrats as they
objected.

"We were objecting under the
Democratic Dimple Principle, the
DDP," Wallace said. "That is the basis
of law that they were trying to
count dimples. We thought it was
important to at least preserve our
objections under the inappropriate
understanding of the law."

Republicans say there's a simple
reason why dimpled ballots didn't
count: They weren't legal. Chief
Justice William Rehnquist's opinion,
joined by Justices Antonin Scalia and
Clarence Thomas, points out that
voters must follow directions, GOP
spokesman Ken Lisaius said.

"To somehow suggest that a ballot
that is dimpled provides us some
sort of intent into a voter's mind is
ridiculous," Lisaius said.

But Dennis Newman, a Boston
lawyer for the Gore campaign, said
counting all dimples is the only
standard that could be applied
across all counties to provide
"equal protection" as demanded by
the U.S. Supreme Court.

Newman also disputed GOP claims
they didn't object initially. He said
he examined the early precincts
and found several Republican
objections.

"We have always said if all the
votes were counted, Al Gore wins
the presidency. That's all we were
fighting for in Florida," said Joe
Andrew, chairman of the
Democratic National Committee.
"The important part here is that
George Bush is claiming he has a
mandate. It is a false mandate."

The U.S. Supreme Court did not say
in its two Dec. 12 majority opinions
what standard to use, and those
opinions do not explicitly say
dimpled ballots should or should
not count.

In Palm Beach County, neither the
Republicans' clear-punch standard
nor the Democrats' all-dimple
standard held sway.

The county canvassing board
counted hundreds of dimpled
ballots as votes. Usually, but not
always, those ballots had dimpled
marks in other races, helping the
board divine the voter's intent by
judging "the totality of the ballot."

However, in about 10 percent of the
disputed under-votes, dimples
appeared elsewhere on the ballot
and the canvassing board still
decided not to count the mark for
president as a vote.

Many of those ballots were marked
for more than one presidential
candidate, Burton said. The Post
review found 41 ballots, or less
than 1 percent of the disputed
ballots, with dimples for Gore or
Bush and at least one other
presidential candidate. About
one-fourth of those had dimples
elsewhere on the ballot.

Such issues complicated the count,
Burton said. For instance, if dimples
counted, then ballots with dimples
for two or more presidential
candidates would have registered
as over-votes. The Post did not
include those 41 ballots in its totals
for Bush and Gore.

Additionally, if all dimples counted,
clearly punched cards for Bush or
Gore accompanied by a dimple for
another candidate would also have
to be recharacterized as
over-votes, Burton said. No media
organization plans to review all the
ballots, so it's unclear whether such
cards were counted as votes.

The Post also judged 144 disputed
ballots to be blank even though
Republicans or Democrats argued
that the ballots contained a vote.
The Post found seven fewer
under-votes marked for Bush and
190 fewer for Gore than recorded
by Democratic observers during the
recount.

While Republicans said all recounts
are unnecessary, especially the
media's, Democrats welcomed the
review, saying they have wanted
the public to see these ballots all
along.

"It's not just an academic exercise,"
Democratic spokesman Rick Hess
said. "It's important to know what
voters said."