American Politics Journal

It's the Overvotes, Stupid!
The 100,000 Gore Votes Big Media Doesn't Like to Mention
by Tamara Baker

Click here for a lame "critique" (snicker) of Tamara's views -- and her response!
Republican Tells Truth About the 2000 Presidential Selection... er, Election!

From the Nov. 11, 2001 issue of the Concord Monitor:
Bush had problems of his own, [gubernatorial candidate Gordon] Humphrey recently said in explaining his loss to Gov. Jeanne Shaheen last year. It was a tough election year for Republicans, Humphrey said at the candidates' forum in Hooksett, where he stood onstage in front of signs proclaiming, "I stand with President Bush."
"The president barely got elected with the help of the Supreme Court," Humphrey told the crowd, which promptly fell silent with shock.
Nov. 14, 2001 -- SAINT PAUL, MINNESOTA (APJP) -- Well, it's been confirmed, now:

If Gore had insisted on a full count of the overvotes in Florida, he'd be in the White House today.

And he could have done so, too.

As Mickey Kaus notes in Slate, Leon County Circuit Court Judge Terry Lewis, who was actually supervising the real-life recount when it was stopped by Nino Scalia, told the Orlando Sentinel that "he would not have ignored the overvote ballots":

Though he stopped short of saying he definitely would have expanded the recount to include overvotes, Lewis emphasized 'I'd be open to that.'
"If that had happened," the Sentinel notes, "it would have amounted to a statewide hand recount. And it could have given the election to Gore," since salvaging the valid overvotes turns out to have been "Gore's only path to victory." Lewis had apparently planned a hearing for later that Saturday, at which the overvote issue was going to be discussed.

Now why is this important, dear readers?

THIS is why:

...the comforting, widely publicized, Bush-ratifying spin given to the recent media recount by the New York Times (and the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post) has been that -- as the Times' lede confidently put it -- "George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward."....We now know, thanks to the Sentinel, that this Times take (and the somewhat more hedged ledes in the Journal and Post) is thoroughly bogus -- unfounded and inaccurate. If the recount had gone forward Judge Lewis might well have counted the overvotes in which case Gore might well have won. Certainly the Times doesn't know otherwise.
That Judge Lewis would probably have counted the overvotes at the perverse (in hindsight) urging of the Bush camp (which either wanted to delay the proceedings or erroneously thought the overvotes would boost Bush's total) doesn't alter this conclusion.

Mickey Kaus is by no means the only commentator to notice the national press' odd devaluing of the overvotes in the rush to prop up George W. Bush's nonexistent "legitimacy". Joshua Micah Marshall chimes in with an excellent column, wherein he discusses the overvotes, and ends by noting:

The only question that's still out there is who really got the most votes. For the historical record, if all the votes had been accurately counted under Florida law as it existed at the time, who would have gotten the most votes in the state?
And the study seems to say pretty clearly that that 'who' was Al Gore.
To me, that seems like the story.

That IS the story. And it's one that our national media is going to great lengths NOT to tell you.

Why? Well, to paraphrase Upton Sinclair, you can't convince a media organization of something if their continued financial well-being depends on remaining ignorant of it. It's something that they have to work very, very hard to do.