[ScottSolomon]

You act as if that was his fault. It wasn't.

When you work together to disenfranchise the voting public to get elected, it is your fault. There was no way Gore was going to get Florida, Katherine Harris saw to that. She sent the voter rolls to DBT On-Line, and she ordered them to purge the rolls of convicted felons, people with similar names to convicted felons, and people with felon's surnames. She even got the felon's list from Texas - she knew the governor there - and purged those names too.

The NAACP filed a suit against DBT On-Line - where it was disclosed that 54% of the voters purged were black, while 95% of the purged voters were purged illegally. Of the 94,000 voters removed from the list, only 3000 were likely convicted felons. The BBC estimates that this action cost Gore 22,000 votes.

On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of “undervotes,” i.e., ballots that failed to register a preference for president in the machine tabulation. The Republicans, who believed this would cost them the election, were desperate to stop the recount, which began Saturday, December 9.

Then, on December 9, like the proverbial cavalry to the rescue, the US Supreme Court issued an extraordinary order to stop the recount. It did so prior to even holding a hearing on the merits of the suit filed by the Bush camp.

In issuing the order to halt the recounts, Justice Scalia was fairly brazen, writing that the vote-counting had to be halted because it might do “irreparable harm” to Bush. In other words, Bush might lose.

Three days later, in a 5-4 decision, the right-wing majority headed by Scalia declared that counting all disputed votes was a violation of “equal protection of the law,” that in any event the US Constitution did not give the people the right to vote for president, and that there was not enough time to set new criteria for a fair count of contested ballots in Florida. On the basis of this thoroughly cynical and unscrupulous legal concoction, the Court majority handed the election to Bush.

However, a Miami Herald study of all of the votes found that Gore would have won in a manual recount - even though it's liberal media headline stated that Bush would have prevailed. That is a twisting of the facts. You have to read the whole story to get even part of the real picture, and they buried.

While Republicans were saying that discerning the "intent of the voters" was a Carnac the magician routine, vote-counters in G.O.P. counties not only discerned the intents of the voters, they RECREATED ABSENTEE BALLOTS based on their discernment of that intent. Ten thousand ballots were RECREATED this way. Absentee votes went to Bush by a ratio of 2:1. That's a net of 3,300 votes for Bush!

Republican officials in 16 counties failed to carry out automatic machine recounts on November 8, the day after the election. This was a clear violation of state election laws, which require such machine retabulations whenever the initial vote count produces a margin of victory of 0.5 percent or smaller.

Studies done by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and Hamilton College in NY have both confirmed ( and rebutted John Lott's erroneous study ) that black votes were undercounted, spoiled, or excluded at a much higher rate than white or Hispanic votes.

On November 12, 2001 a consortium of major US news organizations, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and CNN, released the results of a 10-month investigation into disputed votes cast in Florida during the 2000 presidential election.

The media report presented as its central finding the claim that Bush would have won the election in Florida—by 493 votes—even if the US Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the statewide recount ordered by the Florida high court. It further asserted that Bush would have won by 225 votes if recounts had been completed in the four Florida counties where Gore was seeking them.

The consortium’s report could not come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the response of the media, including what passes for the liberal press, to the unprecedented events of last year. Previous surveys, including a Miami Herald / USA Today study released last April, produced similar results.

Both during and after the 2000 election, the main preoccupation of the media has been to insist on Bush’s political legitimacy and dismiss the election crisis as little more than a partisan squabble. Just two months ago, New York Times Washington bureau chief Richard Berke wrote a column in which he said the events of September 11 had rendered the consortium’s recount “utterly irrelevant.”

But the study was little more than a great example of bad journalism.