IP: Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/recount/12VOTE.html


By FORD FESSENDEN and JOHN M. BRODER


comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's 
presidential election reveals that 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.
Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have 
charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. 
Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore. A close examination of 
the ballots found that Mr. Bush would have retained a slender margin over 
Mr. Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots 
had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court.
Even under the strategy that Mr. Gore pursued at the beginning of the 
Florida standoff — filing suit to force hand recounts in four predominantly 
Democratic counties — Mr. Bush would have kept his lead, according to the 
ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations.
But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than 
those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore 
might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all 
the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would 
have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the 
consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore 
might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the 
one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to "count all the votes."
<snip>


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