Dark Star

Since the release and reviews of the movie Recount and the coming November elections are bound to bring the crap to the forefront again, here's some intellectual ammo for you on the Bush-Gore Florida election.

In 2001, a bunch of News organizations got together and hired the NORC to examine and produce a definitive history of the votes in Florida. From the NORC's website:

A group of the nation's largest news organizations has retained the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago to conduct an in-depth inventory of uncounted ballots from the presidential race in Florida.

The group, which includes The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Tribune Publishing, CNN, Associated Press, the St. Petersburg Times and the Palm Beach Post, plans to produce a database that will describe in detail the 180,000 Florida ballots that didn't register a vote on machine counts – including both undervotes (no vote for president recorded) and overvotes (two or more votes for president). (Tribune, based in Chicago, owns the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, among others; Washington Post Co. owns the Post and Newsweek; The New York Times owns the Boston Globe, the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, and the Lakeland Ledger, among others.)

NORC, a nonprofit survey research firm affiliated with the University of Chicago will view the ballots and abstract information about the marks, or lack of marks, on each. NORC will not attempt to assess whether any particular ballot contains a "vote" but simply describe the marks.

The results of the study were reported at the following:

The Washington Post
The New York Times
CNN
PBS

Basically, Bush would have won even with the recounts which the U.S. Supreme court stopped - twice, had been counted. The only way Gore won in any scenario is if "overvotes," were counted, which they never requested, because it wouldn't have been allowed, because it's impossible to tell voter intent if they voted for two presidential candidates on the same ballot.

So remember, Gore never led Bush, not in the first count, the automatic machine recount, not in the hand recounts, not even if all recounts the Democrats were requesting had been done, completed, turned sideways. It would have never happened for Gore.
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