Letters to the Editor
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Don't drink the rightwing "Bush really did win in 2000" koolaid
"A larger consortium of news organizations, including the USA Today, the Miami Herald, Knight Ridder, the Tampa Tribune, and five other newspapers next conducted a full recount of all ballots, including both undervotes and overvotes. According to their results, under stricter standards for vote counting, Bush won, and under looser standards, Gore won. [12] However, a Gore win was impossible without a recount of overvotes, which he did not request."
Wikipedia articles are periodically hijacked by nutballs, both left and right. That aside about overvotes is the key to the whole election; there were a huge number of overvotes, most of which were absolutely clear in their preference for Gore; most often, the oval for Gore filled in in addition to "Gore" written in in the space confusingly marked "Write-in candidate's name here". So many so that if all the "dimpled chads" etc. were counted for Bush Gore would still have won. Yet, those were thrown out because to the machine, they were "overvotes", marked twice. As for the actual story reported by the Miami Herald, etc., in direct contrast to the above,
"But a Herald-commissioned analysis of voting patterns in each of the state's 5,885 precincts suggests that Florida likely would have gone to Al Gore -- by a slim 23,000 votes -- rather than George W. Bush, the officially certified victor by the wispy margin of 537. It's a hypothetical result derived from something that clearly doesn't exist in Florida or anywhere else in the nation -- an election where every ballot is fully filled out and every one of those ballots gets counted, an elusive ideal going these days by the buzzword ''the will of the people.'' It is also as close as anyone is likely to get to the statewide manual recount that some people say is the only way to fairly assess who
should be awarded Florida's 25 Electoral College votes.
...
''What you're providing evidence for, however speculative, is that more people showed up on election day for Al Gore,'' [Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia's Center for Governmental Studies] said. ''But I'd also state that in our system, woulda, shoulda, coulda doesn't matter. Only legal votes matter.''"
-Miami Herald, Dec. 3, 2000
"But if the recount had been held under new vote-counting rules that Florida and other states now are adopting--rules aimed at recording the intentions of as many voters as possible--Democratic candidate Al Gore probably would have won, although by an even thinner margin, the study found. The study provides evidence that more Florida voters attempted to vote for Gore than for Bush--but so many Gore voters marked their ballots improperly that Bush received more valid votes."
-LA Times, Nov. 12, 2001
"Ultimately, the lesson is the system we had in [Florida] caused so many people to misvote that the real result of the election isn't known. But it does seem likely that more people intended to vote for
Gore than for Bush."
- Doug Pardue of USA Today, Associated Press, 11 May 2001
"...we know that more Floridians intended to vote for Al Gore than George Bush on November 7, 2000."
-Vincent Bugliosi