Analysis: Bush Must Do Statewide Recount
Jack Thompson
Sunday, Nov. 12, 2000
In the early 1980s, California Attorney General John K. Van de Kamp issued a white paper proving the inherent unreliability of electronic voting machines using computer punch ballots.
This was and still is precisely the system used in almost all of Florida. This is forty-year-old technology whose shortcomings are being proven in Palm Beach County this instant. The little rectangles you try to punch out with the steel punch sometimes do not detach from the ballot, leaving what are called "hanging chad," which confuses the electronic reading devices as hundreds of ballots fly by them during the counting process. Punching two rectangles is possible, even by someone reasonably intelligent.
Further, conduct 10 different counts of these types of ballots, and you will get 10 different results. A recount is no more accurate than the first count.
In Leon County, Florida, the supervisor of elections has gone to a different system, whereby each voter fills in an oval on a ballot with a simple lead pencil. The recently concluded recount there resulted in an astonishing exact replication of the first vote total. Not a single vote out of place.
In 1988, when I ran against Janet Reno, one of the three major issues I raised was the antiquated electronic voting system in Dade County and around the state because of voting irregularities generated by it, including the option of fraud. The computer program controlling the electronic reader can be altered, clandestinely, to change the count. I cited the California Attorney General's white paper in doing so. Reno resisted the idea. She knew something.
We now are seeing today what she knew, and what the Bush team ought to do.
They must abandon their ill-timed and ill-conceived lawsuit to try to block the hand recounting of ballots. They must go down another path, the path of seeking a hand recount in the entire state.
Granted, the Bush team did not raise this option within the 72-hour period required, but equitable principles applied by a court can mandate a statewide hand recount even now. The change in the vote total in Palm Beach is an unwitting gift by the Democrats to the Republicans. Are they smart enough to grab it? The unintended gift allows Bush to take the "high road" of wanting an accurate vote, and it allows him to pick up more votes. Just now on Fox News, it is reported than a hand recount in Republican Polk County has delivered more than 100 additional votes for Bush.
Where Are the Republicans?
Christopher Ruddy
Friday, Nov. 10, 2000
In my short life I have learned that Democrats throw better parties, know how to have fun � and have a penchant for stealing elections.
Politics to them is blood sport.
That�s not true for Republicans. They like to behave like the nice guy.
And that�s great � except when you are in a life and death struggle for the future of this country.
Bush has exemplified the good guy approach.
He ran � let�s admit it � the most pathetic campaign in modern history. Gore walked all over him. He blew a 16-point lead that he held for six months. In the end, he didn't do much better than Bob Dole.
Now a high-level Bush operative tells NewsMax.com that the Republicans have no intention of fighting here.
"We�re taking the high road," the Bush lawyer told NewsMax.com.
Nixon took the high road in 1960 � and we got Vietnam, Johnson, the Great Society, and a mess.
Gore campaign manager Bill Daley spoke boldly on election night, as he retracted the Gore concession, "The campaign continues."
To the Gore folks this is not about an electoral process. This is war! The campaign continues.
I have no doubt the Democrats of South Florida have stolen lots of votes in this election and what should have been a Bush victory is now a horse race.
Gore is closing fast. Bush is passively allowing the absentee ballots alone to make the final determination. They may give Bush the election � and they may not.
Meanwhile Gore is pressing on every front � he is out seeking the hearts and minds of the American people. He has the popular vote � or so it seems � that gives him a tremendous psychological club as his people try to steal the vote in South Florida.
As Gore wages war, the Republicans keep the title of Mr. Nice Guy.
From almost the moment they lost, Gore�s Democrats have been crying foul, and have made tremendous progress in trying to overturn the election result.
And the Republicans?
They have been talking about forming a new government with Colin Powell as Secretary of State.
They could have swooped down here to South Florida, unearthing the massive voter fraud that has taken place, no doubt, in Miami-Dade and Broward.
Republican pundits could be screaming how just two years ago the Mayor of Miami was thrown out of office for voter fraud.
Instead, there is hand-wringing in the Bush campaign. Their team looks nervous and exhausted. (Please no more press conferences with Don Evans looking like he hasn�t slept in three days! Perception IS important.)
Now the election is down to a mysterious batch of absentee ballots � which Bush�s spokeswoman says are usually favorable to Republicans.
This reminds me of Bob Dornan, who went to bed winning the ballot on election night in 1996, only to find that the absentee ballots � with illegal aliens voting, no less � gave the election to his opponent.
You can bet the Florida Democrats � where documented voter fraud has been a way of life down here for decades � already have concocted schemes to steal the absentee vote.
First stop for the Bush campaign: check the U.S Post Office. Could Gore allies in the postal service be intercepting mail-in absentee ballots as we speak?
Daley: Let the Courts Decide
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
William Daley, Al Gore's campaign chairman, rejected on Tuesday an offer that the Bush campaign contended would allow the election to come to an end in a timely manner: If the Gore campaign dropped the legal challenge to the Florida return deadline, the Bush camp would drop its challenge to the legality of hand recounts.
Daley, who served as President Clinton's Commerce secretary until this past summer, made a brief statement to reporters on his way to a meeting with some members of the Senate.
Dennis Cook/AP
Tuesday: William Daley, Vice President Al Gore's campaign chairman, briefs reporters at the Capitol in Washington.
DALEY: We are waiting for a judgment by the court in Tallahassee as to the questions that were proposed yesterday. I saw with interest my friend Secretary (James) Baker's proposal, which was really just a reiteration of what the secretary of state had laid out yesterday, which, as you know, is in court right now. And I think any further comment on that would be inappropriate until the court rules, other than to say that it truly was not a proposal. It was strictly, in my opinion, an inaccurate description of the laws of Florida. And, again, the laws of Florida will be determined by the courts, not by representatives of these two campaigns.
In addition, Secretary Baker stated that there has been a continuing statement regarding "only four counties doing hand counts." The fact of the matter is, there are seven additional counties that have gone to a hand count in one form or other, six of which Governor Bush has won. So the hand counts that have been done to this point, or are being considered to be done in Florida, are a mix of counties that some would assume would be for Al Gore and some would assume and have been proven to be in favor of Governor Bush.
So I think this continuing inaccurate statement regarding the number of counties that are using hand counts are somehow implying these are only Democratic counties is inappropriate and inaccurate.
So we should wait until the court rules shortly, and then move forward. Our goal is to get to a fair and accurate count, one that confirms the opinions and the decisions of the people of Florida. This is not about the individuals, but about upholding the system of democracy, which is based upon the right to vote and have our votes accurately counted. And that's what's going on in Florida, and we should allow that process to move forward.
Q: What's wrong with a statewide recount?
DALEY: That was not proposed, as far as I understand, by Mr. Baker.
Q: How about Baker's statement that this process is affecting Wall Street?
DALEY: The markets go up, as former (Treasury) Secretary Bob Rubin used to say, and the markets go down. I think most honest observers of the market today would say that, if there are changes in the market, they're a result of some of the earning statements that have been put out by the companies, having nothing to do with what's going on in the political world.
Q: Is there anything that you would see as being a fair compromise?
DALEY: I think we've got to not try to usurp the courts of Florida. That is a judicial process. The heart of our democracy is the fact that if people feel they've been wronged, they can go into court. We all have full faith in the court system, and there's nothing inappropriate about people trying to get redress in the courts. That's the heart of our system, and I think we ought to not be afraid of that.
Q: If this deadline is upheld today, does it then become very difficult for Mr. Gore to win in Florida?
DALEY: I think, as was stated yesterday and was stated in court, this interpretation of the statute of Florida by the secretary of state, to say this is all shut down at 5 (p.m. ET), probably is intended to stop the hand counts that are going on. Whether that helps Al Gore or not is still to be determined. I mean, there's still a question. Some people speculate they have an answer as to what the end result of these hand counts would be. If they do, they must be checking a Ouija board or something, because nobody knows.
Opinion: Prepare for Political War
Tuesday, November 14, 2000
By Rod Dreher
Exuding a Strangelovian calm, Al Gore declared to the media Monday that he would commit the political equivalent of bombing Florida back to the Stone Age.
With skin-crawling unctuousness, Gore mewled that this election wasn't about him, but about "our democracy."
And he said he wouldn't want to win "by a few votes cast in error or misinterpreted or not counted."
MSNBC commentator Chris Matthews heard in the veep's deceptively mild words a declaration of total war.
"He has escalated this thing all the way," a stunned Matthews said, explaining that Gore appears prepared to fight for an extraordinary revote in Palm Beach County.
Will the Republicans at long last realize that they're battling extremely clever berserkers who will do anything � anything � to win? Haven't they been paying attention for the past eight years?
Ex-radical-turned-neoconservative David Horowitz, a Bush adviser whose most recent book is "The Art of Political War," is sickened and astonished by what he's seeing unfold in Florida.
"What Al Gore has done by unleashing the dogs of political war here is the most irresponsible act of a political leader in my lifetime," Horowitz said.
"What they're doing is delegitimating the next government. Once the traditional order has broken down, it's all against all."
Conservatives have waged the Florida war less well than the left, said Horowitz, because they are temperamentally ill-suited for scorched-earth political combat.
Believing, "If only one side is shooting, the other side will soon be dead," Horowitz is trying to teach the guerrilla warfare he learned on the ramparts of the radical left to his new allies on the right.
"I always feel ambivalent as an ex-leftist teaching Republicans bad manners," Horowitz said. "But the reality is, when there is no referee, when the gloves are off, you have to beat them back by similar methods."
The left took the propaganda initiative Monday, organizing "nonpartisan" demonstrations around the country. Monday's relatively small event in downtown New York was a pro-Gore media bonanza, thanks largely to a brief appearance by Hollywood liberal Alec Baldwin.
With the cameras rolling, unreconstructed Sixties radical Todd Gitlin, see-no-evil Clinton loyalist Rep. Jerrold Nadler and others upchucked the most fraudulent oratory since the last time Gore opened his mouth.
They quoted the Declaration of Independence. They invoked patriots of yore. They recalled the civil-rights movement. A rabbi even likened their struggle to that of the Israelites escaping Pharaoh, headed to the Promised Land.
Meanwhile, in an attempt to present a neutral face to the viewers at home, an organizer tried to get people hoisting openly pro-Gore signs (including a lovely one calling for the decapitation of Gov. Bush) to stifle it.
The demo was a sparsely attended crock, but it made for effective TV. Once again, clueless conservatives are allowing themselves to get clobbered on the propaganda front.
"We should have had demonstrations in the streets saying this is a political coup d'etat, and we have to defend the Constitution," said Horowitz. "And we should have been doing it first. But Republicans don't go into the streets. We're not about mob rule."
True. But the ruthless Democrats aren't giving them a choice. So far, it looks like Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who is holding Democrats to the letter of the law by forcing counties to have all their votes certified by Tuesday at 5 p.m., is the only Republican willing to play hardball by the Dems' rules.
Team Gore is screaming bloody murder.
Good.
Harris is doing her job.
"Politically, it is better to be seen as a peacemaker than as a warmonger," Horowitz writes in his book.
"But it is not always possible. If forced to fight, then fight to win."
Statistics point to more than random error in Florida vote
By Jace Radke
LAS VEGAS SUN
At one in 49 million, the chances of hitting Megabucks on one spin are slim, but not as slim as the odds that Vice President Al Gore would make up as much ground as he has in the Florida recount, according to a UNLV study.
Economics professor Tom Carroll began running statistical equations Thursday on the net gains both Gore, who gained more than 2,200 votes, and Texas Gov. George W. Bush, who added about 700 votes, have made in the recount. He found that the statistical chances for such large and different totals to occur as a result of random glitches was less than infinitesimal.
"The probability of being struck by lightning is about one in a million," Carroll said. "The same person would have to be hit by lightning 30 times to compare with what we've seen in this recount."
Carroll's equations assume that any problems in the original counting of ballots in Florida were caused by computer errors or innocuous human errors, and the chances that errors of this magnitude were the result of computer or human mistakes is extremely thin according to Carroll's calculations.
"A recount is a 50-50 proposition, so statistically speaking, making up something like 1,700 votes is highly unlikely," Carroll said. "For this to have been just random error is statistically unlikely. It wouldn't be unlikely to see some changes in the number of votes during a recount, but the differences should come much closer to canceling each other out."
Carroll, a Democrat, used the computations to illustrate a point in his Thursday night statistics class for students seeking a master's degree in business administration.
"The students were flabbergasted to see what they've been learning applied to a real-life situation," Carroll said. "It really is a small, small number as far as the chances of such a big difference between the changes in the numbers of votes between the candidates. It's something like 179 zeros and then a two and a three."
Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., and former Gov. Bob Miller, honorary chairman of the Gore campaign in Nevada, are among the Democratic officials nationwide questioning the chances of such irregularities showing up in the recount.
"As someone who has experienced two close recounts, I know that they don't usually lead to big changes in the vote totals," Reid said at a Thursday news conference. "This election changes all the rules. In the Florida recount we've seen huge changes in the vote totals, and on top of that, there are serious allegations of voting irregularities and potential fraud. This election needs to be scrutinized closely."
Reid went through a recount of Washoe County when Senator-elect John Ensign attempted to win Reid's seat in 1998. On election night Reid won by 401 votes, and after the recount the final margin was 428.
Bush had a 1,784-vote election night lead over Gore. After the recount, the unofficial margin for Bush is 327 votes.
