Rotf!! Those are great.
I was thinking about why most Americans don't know that Gore should have been declared the winner of Florida in 2000, and given the presidency. We all know Bush won when the Supreme Court took the unprecedented step of stepping in and halting the recounts, thus handing Bush the victory. And many of us heard the news that came out years later from a study that concluded if the recounts had continued, Bush still would have won.
But what also came out, but didn't get much attention, was that if the ENTIRE state of Florida had been recounted, Gore would have won. He actually had a small lead in Florida.
The GOP did a fairly good job of getting the first part of the story out. Gore had pushed for recounts in those counties where he was already ahead - where there were lots of voting irregularities - where he believed he could pick up a few hundred more votes, which was all he needed to win Florida. He was only 219 votes behind at the time, and there were literally thousand of votes that had been tossed out. There were people in heavily Democratic precincts who were turned away from the polls in droves. There were all those hanging chads and the like. There was the question of the misleading ballots that caused thousands to vote for the wrong candidate. It's no wonder he demanded recounts.
But studies showed that if he had succeeded in recounting the contested counties again, he still would have lost. But another study showed that if he had only demanded that the entire state be recounted, he would have won. Why didn't he demand a recount of all of Florida? Because he didn't think he would win all of Florida in a recount. His mistake. And he was hardly going to make a big deal about it, since in all fairness he should have recounted the entire state, not just those counties where he felt he could win.
Of course the Supreme Court decided to step in and rule on the recounts. And on a vote of 5/4 right down party lines, they decided to stop the recounts, return to a previous count, and thus hand the Presidency to Bush who had just lost the popular vote by half a million. And for a short while, America woke up to the notion that justice really depends on who is dispensing it.
So the GOP pushed out the news that Gore's recount would not have changed the outcome, and Gore sat on the news that if he had been more fair and recounted the entire state, he would have won.
Personally I wish we would do away with the electoral college and go to a popular vote conducted on voting machines with paper documents that are checked later for accuracy. But if we did that, candidates would spend most of their time campaigning in the most populated states and ignoring the middle of the country, and the Democrats would win big time. So nobody is ever going to agree to that.
So we're stuck with a system that gave us Bush, with half a million fewer votes than Gore. And we almost had Kerry with three million fewer votes than Bush. Kerry almost won Ohio. If he had, he'd be President, despite losing the popular vote by three million. And look at Ohio. Electronic voting machines that were shown in tests to be easy to hack, and had no paper trail. Thousands complained that their Kerry votes changed to Bush when they pressed the button. But there was no way to prove it. No paper. The local GOP INSISTED that the machines be used. They blocked every attempt to get a paper trail. Some heavily Democratic precincts voted overwhelmingly for Bush. Some precincts had more Bush votes than they had voters. The man who created those voting machines openly said ahead of the election that he was going to deliver Ohio to Bush. What a mess! Meanwhile millions and millions of Americans continued to believe in the inherent fairness of the system, thinking that despite the enormity of what was at stake - all the power - that our voting system would never be tampered with because this is America. We definitely need a more tamper-proof system.
Well, I think the 2008 election is going to be a lot less depressing.
AI
