Recount proved Gore won under all scenarios

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

"In the review of all the state's disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide"

- Associated Press

It's time to refresh everyone's memory of the NORC recount of the Florida 2000 vote. This recount, the only one ever completed, proved a Gore victory under all scenarios for a state-wide recount.

Note that under this recount Gore won even if you include Republican fraud such as the late absentee votes (which were only accepted in Republican counties), the thousands of votes lost to illegal disenfranchisement when people were falsely accused of being felons, and the curious "Jews for Buchanan" phenomenon with the butterfly ballot. If you count the votes, Gore won. If you don't count the votes, Bush won. It's that simple.

What does this mean? It means Gore won both the electoral college and the popular vote. It means the man currently in the oval office is a not a legitimate president. It means democracy was defeated in the year 2000. It means Americans are now living under a coup. Never lose sight of these facts.

Here follows the results in full of the NORC recount. Six different standards for hanging chads and such were considered. All six scenarios resulted in a Gore victory.

-PREVAILING STANDARD: County election officials told Florida journalists how they would define votes if required to do a recount and in this scenario the majority standard was imposed statewide. In punch-card counties, ballots with at least one corner of a chad detached counted as votes. In optical scan counties, where voters are required to fill in blanks on a paper ballot -- like on a standardized test -- ballots with any affirmative marks counted. That means a vote counted even if the oval was not completely filled in or a candidate's name was circled or underlined; so did ballots on which a voter correctly filled in the oval and also wrote the same candidate's name in the space for write-ins.

Result: Gore ahead by 60 votes.

-TWO-CORNER STANDARD: At least two corners of a chad must be detached to count as a vote, a position that had been argued, at times, by Bush supporters. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.

Result: Gore ahead by 105 votes.

-MOST INCLUSIVE: Ballots with dimpled chads count as votes, an argument often made by Gore supporters. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.

Result: Gore ahead by 107 votes.

-LEAST INCLUSIVE: Only cleanly punched chads count as valid votes. For optical scan, only fully filled ovals and those ballots on which a voter filled in the oval and wrote in the candidate's name, too.

Result: Gore ahead by 115 votes.

-COUNTY-by-COUNTY: Drawn from the county election officials. It accepts results from Broward and Volusia counties because those counties completed hand counts that were included in state-certified election totals. For those counties that said they would not count overvotes, relies on prevailing standard.

Result: Gore ahead by 171 votes.

-PALM BEACH STANDARD: Based on a standard Palm Beach election officials briefly used, this counts dimpled chads as valid votes if a pattern of dimpled chads exists elsewhere on the same ballot. Same as prevailing standard for optical scan ballots.

Result: Gore ahead by 42 votes.

Media reaction

A close examination of the ballots suggests that more Floridians attempted to choose Gore over Bush. -- Chicago Tribune

Gore would have won most recount scenarios that included "overvotes," ballots that showed votes for more than one candidate. Democrats long have contended that a plurality of Florida voters intended to cast their ballots for Gore but that thousands spoiled their votes because of confusing instructions, badly designed ballots or other obstacles. The study adds evidence to bolster that case. -- LA Times

One of the most compelling questions since the election has been: Who would have won if all the uncounted ballots were hand-counted using the same standards? If that had happened using the counting methods most widely used in the state, the
study shows, Bush would have gotten an extra 3,607 votes, Gore an extra 4,204 -- giving Gore the state by a scant 60-vote margin. -- Orlando Sentinel

But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots,
or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins. -- Washington Post

Translation from Washington Post whorespeak to English: The study showed the majority of Floridians voted for Gore.

The consortium looked at what might have happened if a statewide recount had included these overvotes as well and found that Gore would have had a margin of fewer than 200 votes -- CNN

Translation from CNN whorespeak to English: The study showed the majority of Floridians voted for Gore.

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." -- NY Times

Translation from NY Times whorespeak to English: The study showed the majority of Floridians voted for Gore.

A vote-by-vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election commissioned by the nation's main media outlets shows Al Gore edged ahead of George W. Bush "under all the scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide," the Drudge Report has learned. -- Matt Drudge

Don't ever let anyone tell you to "get over" this, folks. You don't get over the subversion of democracy in the most powerful nation on the planet. You don't get over an illegal coup. Don't let the Republicans get away with the most monumental theft in history. You owe a debt to your ancestors as well as your children to ensure that this crime is never forgotten.

[RaiderH8r]

Had the good people of Tennesee, Gore's home state, seen fit to vote in his favor Florida would be moot. Maybe he should have shored up his own back yard.

Maybe if Dems weren't so f***ing stupid they could have figured out the ballot. I've never seen anybody so adamant their failure as a party is due to the stupidity of their supporters. "We didn't lose, our supporters are just too stupid to vote." Nice.

[bendog]

Sadly, had the "count" gone the other way, we'd most likely not be in Iraq right now. Though, I did suspect Gore of harboring ideas about putting 'peace keepers' in Palestine.

[W*GS]

Kennedy and his Daddy's political machine screwed the GOP and Nixon back in '60.

Does it really matter if it was almost 5 years ago or 45 years?

Keep clinging to your "coup" mentality, LABF - the few folks out there on the fringe do need the company.

[Rohirrim]

Originally Posted by W*GS

Kennedy and his Daddy's political machine screwed the GOP and Nixon back in '60.

Does it really matter if it was almost 5 years ago or 45 years?

Keep clinging to your "coup" mentality, LABF - the few folks out there on the fringe do need the company.

Yeah. What a shame that Nixon didn't get into office even earlier.

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

Yeah. What a shame that Nixon didn't get into office even earlier.

Vietnam may have been avoided. Ponder that.

[bendog]

Nixon might have got shot! Who was his vp candidate?

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by bendog

Nixon might have got shot! Who was his vp candidate?

Henry Lodge. I had to look it up.

[Rohirrim]

Originally Posted by W*GS

Vietnam may have been avoided. Ponder that.

Now you're in dreamland.

[bendog]

I tried briefly and unsuccessfully to find much on Lodge jr.s political stances, aside from JFK beat him for the senate, and Lodge was Ike's campaign manager. I dunno. A hawk, and JFK was one, would've had an easire time getting out of vietnam than LBJ. LBJ waged an elecitve war on a lie (gulf on tonken) to keep the hawks off his ass politically. I find it hard to believe Nixon would've done much differently than JFK, though JFK was more reckless in confronting the bear than Nixon was. But supporting the French would've been natural.

The irony being that Wolfy got his start pushing vietnam for the dems.

[Rohirrim]

The real sad part of this is that we have obviously learned absolutely nothing.

[bendog]

Well, we learned something, but somehow we forgot it when bushii became potus.

I think the mainstream media was scared to contradict the lies for fear of pissing off P&G and Merck and looking unpatriotic. I think the dems were scared to challange the boy warrior king's lies, because they thought it'd be a cakewalk and a non-issue for 2004. But yes, bushii learned nothing.

[Rohirrim]

Personally, I believe that 9/11 would have been stopped had Gore been elected. He would have kept the same anti-terrorism team and, to use the words of Richard Clarke, he would have "shaken the tree." There would have been a seamless transition of personnel and information, not the political gutting of the CIA and FBI that Bush orchestrated. Perhaps the info the CIA had on two of the 911 participants they were tracking, and lost in Thailand, would have made it to the FBI. Perhaps the reports of flight training would have made it to the top. That's pure speculation. What is not speculation is that the Bush administration did absolutely nothing about Bin Laden or Islamic terrorists for 8 months. They were too busy scouring the government for dissenters that they could replace with loyalists. I imagine if you're in the FBI or CIA, it's hard to keep track of those terrorists when all about you, careers are being dashed and heads are rolling in accordance with the long coveted "hit lists" of Rove, Rummy and Cheney.

First, Scalia bypasses the Constitutional responsibility of Congress to decide the election and crowns the boy king (an act which he later describes gave him "great pleasure"), and this right before his hunting trip with Cheney. Then, after 9/11 happens, Bush picks up his bullhorn and the press gets down on its knees and opens its mouth for the boy king. Followed by the invasion of a country that had nothing whatsover to do with 9/11. Why invade Iraq? Because they were at the top of the Cheney/Rummy "get even" list. A list they had carried around with them for a decade. So Bush's own incompetence, cavalier arrogance and simple petty mindedness guided, not by just one Iago, but a whole pack of them, leads to the tragedy from which he emerges wearing the crown of laurels. It's like something out of Caligula, or some Greek play where everyone is doomed by the dark Fates.

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

Personally, I believe that 9/11 would have been stopped had Gore been elected. He would have kept the same anti-terrorism team and, to use the words of Richard Clarke, he would have "shaken the tree."

Richard Clarke disagrees. From the March 24 2004 9/11 Commission hearings:

"MR. GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this. Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on the line of -- based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted, say, on January 26, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

MR. CLARKE: No.

MR. GORTON: It just would have allowed our response after 9/11 to be perhaps a little bit faster?

MR. CLARKE: Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.

MR. GORTON: But -- yes, but we weren't going to -- there was no recommendation on your part or anyone else's part that we declare war and attempt to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11?

MR. CLARKE: That's right."

9/11 would have happened if Gore was President, because there was no policy or plan in place to prevent it. Period.

[Rohirrim]

Originally Posted by W*GS

Richard Clarke disagrees. From the March 24 2004 9/11 Commission hearings:

"MR. GORTON: Now, since my yellow light is on, at this point my final question will be this. Assuming that the recommendations that you made on January 25th of 2001, based on the line of -- based on Blue Sky, including aid to the Northern Alliance which had been an agenda item at this point for two and a half years without any action, assuming that there had been more Predator reconnaissance missions, assuming that that had all been adopted, say, on January 26, year 2001, is there the remotest chance that it would have prevented 9/11?

MR. CLARKE: No.

MR. GORTON: It just would have allowed our response after 9/11 to be perhaps a little bit faster?

MR. CLARKE: Well, the response would have begun before 9/11.

MR. GORTON: But -- yes, but we weren't going to -- there was no recommendation on your part or anyone else's part that we declare war and attempt to invade Afghanistan prior to 9/11?

MR. CLARKE: That's right."

9/11 would have happened if Gore was President, because there was no policy or plan in place to prevent it. Period.

I have the guts to call my speculations just that, speculations. While you pretend that your speculations are fact. BTW, who said anything about a pre-emptive strike on Afghanistan, or whether such a strike would have anything to do with 9/11. The perps were already in the U.S. "Shaking the tree" applies to them, and what they were doing, not the Taliban.

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

I have the guts to call my speculations just that, speculations. While you pretend that your speculations are fact.

My speculations are supported by the facts. Yours aren't.

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

BTW, who said anything about a pre-emptive strike on Afghanistan, or whether such a strike would have anything to do with 9/11. The perps were already in the U.S.

Some were, some weren't.

There was no chance that the policies that had been in place that restricted information flow between the relevant agencies, plus the "stovepipes" that didn't help, would have been dramatically changed by a Gore administration such that the 9/11 plot would have been detected and stopped. Government bureaucracies just don't move that fast.

[Rohirrim]

Originally Posted by W*GS

My speculations are supported by the facts. Yours aren't.

Only in your mind. The above conversation applies to nothing. How does a Predator mission stop 9/11?

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

What is not speculation is that the Bush administration did absolutely nothing about Bin Laden or Islamic terrorists for 8 months. They were too busy scouring the government for dissenters that they could replace with loyalists.

That's correct.

Not only did the junta do nothing - it ignored repeated warnings from numerous intelligence sources that al Qaeda was planning suicide attacks inside the U.S.

Following the judicial coup in which he seized power, one of the illegal usurper's first acts was to dismantle the outgoing administration's counterterrorism apparatus and to replace it with NOTHING.

VP GoFYourself was charged with creating a new counterterrorism task force. This task force NEVER MET ONCE PRIOR TO 9/11.

Such is The O'W*GS Factor's zeal to get Team Chimp off the hook for allowing the worst intelligence failure in American history to happen on its watch on 9/11 that he is willing to ignore these and countless other inconvenient facts.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by The O'W*GS Factor

Keep clinging to your "coup" mentality, LABF - the few folks out there on the fringe do need the company.

Right-wing fringe-speak-to-English Translation:

"I can't refute the evidence presented, i.e., that a recount proved Gore won under all scenarios, so I'll just have to pretend that attributing a "coup mentality" to my opponent constitutes an actual refutation."

Originally Posted by The O'W*GS Factor

9/11 would have happened if Gore was President, because there was no policy or plan in place to prevent it. Period.

Not only is this pure conjecture, but it's unreasonable conjecture unsupported by either facts or logic.

Fact: The Clinton administration had a counterterrorism apparatus in place (one that successfully thwarted a number of terrorism plots during the Clinton years.)

The Smirk & Sneer junta had NO counterterrorism apparatus of ANY kind in place before 9/11. Counterterrorism was not even on Askkkroft's DOJ's agenda (whereas counterterrorism was #1 on Janet Reno's DOJ's agenda and the #1 funding priority.)

Had Gore taken his rightful place as Clinton's successor, there would have been a continuity of policy and prioritization re: counterterrorism. During the transition, Clinton and his team warned Team Chimp that Bin Laden and al Qaeda should be its top priority. Team Chimp basically told Clinton to pound sand. Not only is it highly unlikely that Gore would have done the same thing, it's very unlikely that Gore would have deliberately ignored multiple intelligence warnings from mulltiple sources that al Qaeda was planning suicide attacks inside the U.S.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

To further debunk O'W*GS' right-wing disinfo re: 9/11:

Too many free passes

NOW THAT all but the most partisan and stubborn defenders of President Bush agree that he screwed up his response to Katrina, and nearly as many agree that he screwed up the occupation of Iraq, it probably seems unnecessary to continue beating up the administration over those failures of the past.

Instead, I say we dwell on some other administration foul-ups from even further in the past that most people have forgotten about by now. You know, in the spirit of magnanimity.

I'm thinking specifically of two controversies. First, the administration's failure to act on intelligence that could have stopped the Sept. 11 attacks. And second, its refusal to commit ground troops to the battle of Tora Bora in 2001, leading to the escape of Osama bin Laden and his lieutenants.

In both cases, the administration received the benefit of the doubt. In light of what we now know about the administration's incompetence, however, this benefit is wholly unwarranted.

Start with 9/11. Beginning in May 2001, it began to come to light that the administration had considerable intelligence about possible terrorist attacks. The FBI had warned the administration that terrorists were planning to hijack airplanes. Bush received a memo in August 2001 titled, "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S."

The administration insisted that none of the warnings focused on the possibility that terrorists would hijack planes and crash them into buildings. As Condoleezza Rice insisted at the time: "I don't think anybody could have predicted that these people would take an airplane and slam it into the World Trade Center, take another one and slam it into the Pentagon, that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile. All of this reporting about hijacking was about traditional hijacking."

This defense was, first of all, completely insipid. If you suspect terrorists are going to hijack planes, then you step up security to keep them off the planes. What they plan to do with the planes is pretty secondary. Suppose you knew they planned to fly them into buildings. It's not like your response would be to let the terrorists on board but cover all the major landmarks with enormous foam-rubber cushions.

Anyway, this ludicrous defense wasn't even true. It came out earlier this month that U.S. aviation officials were warned as early as 1998 that Al Qaeda sought to "hijack a commercial jet and slam it into a U.S. landmark."

And yet, while the administration took some heat, in the end it got a pass. An L.A. Times editorial in 2002 typified the reaction: "So intelligence sources informed President Bush in August that Osama bin Laden's terrorists might attempt to hijack airplanes? Excuse us, but administration officials have good reason to look perplexed as they wonder aloud what the increasingly indignant chorus of critics would have had the president do with that amorphous warning."

The administration got a similar pass on Tora Bora. This happened at the end of the Afghanistan campaign, when we had Bin Laden and about 800 of his top men surrounded. Rather than use the 4,000 U.S. troops that were in the area, Army Gen. Tommy Franks instead relied on poorly trained, ill-equipped Afghan tribesman of dubious loyalty. Predictably, Bin Laden got away.

Here, too, the excuses were always absurd. "We don't know to this day whether Mr. Bin Laden was at Tora Bora," wrote Franks (who since retired and endorsed Bush) a year ago. In fact, according to a document on the Pentagon website, we did have intelligence that Bin Laden was there. But even if we weren't certain, was that a good reason not to do our best to try to capture him? Should you avoid using your best troops to surround the enemy because, hey, the top bad guy might not be inside?

I suspect Tora Bora never seriously hurt Bush for the same basic reason the 9/11 stuff didn't hurt him: There was a basic presumption of competence surrounding the administration. Everybody assumed there must have been some ambiguities; that they couldn't have screwed up that badly.

The Bush administration probably wouldn't have enjoyed this presumption if these stories came out after Iraq and Katrina. Because all of a sudden the thesis that it screwed up just that badly — that a minimally competent administration would have acted differently — looks pretty compelling.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/...3359929.column

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by L.A. BRONCOS FAN

Fact: The Clinton administration had a counterterrorism apparatus in place (one that successfully thwarted a number of terrorism plots during the Clinton years.)

That apparatus hadn't done a very good job of detecting the 9/11 plot, which had been underway for quite some time. Also, a Gore administration wouldn't have been able to miraculously overhaul the intelligence and law-enforcement bureaucracies in time - and it was those bureaucracies and the policy barriers between them that pretty much made it impossible to connect the dots and stop the 9/11 attacks. If you'd read the entire 9/11 Commission report, you'd know that.

[Rohirrim]

Originally Posted by W*GS

That apparatus hadn't done a very good job of detecting the 9/11 plot, which had been underway for quite some time. Also, a Gore administration wouldn't have been able to miraculously overhaul the intelligence and law-enforcement bureaucracies in time - and it was those bureaucracies and the policy barriers between them that pretty much made it impossible to connect the dots and stop the 9/11 attacks. If you'd read the entire 9/11 Commission report, you'd know that.

So, your argument is that Bush's policy of "do nothing" was superior to anything that Gore could have come up with by keeping Clarke and his anti-terrorism network in place? And the flaws in the existing intelligence apparatus lead you to the conclusion that no apparatus whatsoever was the better option? Like Clarke pointed out many times, "shaking the tree" in the existing apparatus "might not" have worked, but compared to the Bush policy of ignoring the problem completely, what would a reasonable person assume to be the better strategy? Keep in mind, the reports of flight training, the CIA tails in Thailand on two of the perps, etc. were in the intelligence grapevine before 9/11. Is it too difficult to contemplate that a more aggressive administration "might" have brought those reports to the top even without a complete overhaul of the existing intelligence network?

[W*GS]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

So, your argument is that Bush's policy of "do nothing"

Despite LABF's claims to the contrary, the Bush administration didn't "do nothing". Read the 9/11 Commission report. In its entirety, as I have.

Don't forget that a Gore administration would have been just as hamstrung by policy and bureaucratic nonsense - there was no incentive to change anything.

Granted, it's an exercise in what-might-have-beens, but I don't believe that a Gore administration would have been able to stop 9/11, if they could have even begun to figure out what was going to happen.

[L.A. BRONCOS FAN]

Originally Posted by Rohirrim

So, your argument is that Bush's policy of "do nothing" was superior to anything that Gore could have come up with by keeping Clarke and his anti-terrorism network in place?

Yes, believe it or not, that is the gist of W*GS' "argument."

All that kneeling and bobbing for the boy king has obviously resulted in some neurological damage.