http://mediamatters.org/items/200407200008

O'Reilly lied about Florida recount

During the July 19 edition of The O'Reilly Factor, FOX News Channel host Bill O'Reilly responded to a viewer e-mail questioning the legitimacy of President George W. Bush's election in 2000 by falsely insisting, "Bush would have won [in Florida] no matter what." In fact, the post-election study of various recount scenarios revealed several plausible situations in which then-Vice President Al Gore would have won Florida.

From the July 19 edition of The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Jorge Cuevas, Fort Lauderdale, Florida [reading email]: "Mr. O'Reilly, you keep saying that people are disrespectful towards the president. This current, non-elected president has done nothing to earn respect." At least four organizations analyzed the Florida vote in 2000, Mr. Cuevas, and all concluded Bush would have won no matter what. Wise up, sir. Fanatical rantings will not help your life. I'm just looking out for you.

In fact, as Media Matters for America noted on June 23 and June 30, the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) studied Florida's disputed ballots and concluded that Gore emerged the winner in at least four recount scenarios. The NORC study was sponsored by news organizations including The Associated Press, The New York Times, and CNN, as well as The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post Co., and Tribune Publishing (which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel). According to a November 12, 2001, Washington Post article on the NORC's findings, "[I]f 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."

Guys, can any of you find the facts on this one? I will post it on our Gore myths page if you can write a short article.

Neil Boortz (750 AM) in Atlanta is echoing this same line as well.
Please somneone bring info to the forum...

Its time to call their bluff

-GoreLeadership

11-23-2001, Source: www.msnbc.com web site

New documents raise questions about news media’s findings on the 2000 presidential election

By Michael Isikoff - Newsweek Magazine

Nov. 19 — After spending nearly $1 million, a consortium of big news organizations last week rendered what it once thought would be final word on last year’s bitterly contested Florida recount.

THE DECISION: a split verdict. To the chagrin of Democratic partisans, the consortium proclaimed Bush still would have won the apparently limited statewide recount underway last December 9 even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not swooped in and stopped it. But if all disputed ballots had been manually counted—something, ironically, neither side had even asked for—Al Gore could have eked out a narrow victory.

That, at least, is how the story got played last week in front page stories in The New York Times, Washington Post and other newspapers that participated in this curious historical exercise. (Newsweek was briefly part of the consortium but dropped out because of scheduling conflicts before the project was completed.) But is that really the last word? Don’t count on it.

Buried deep in the files of the mammoth Florida litigation, Newsweek has uncovered hastily scribbled faxed notes written by Terry Lewis, the plain-speaking, mystery-novel writing state judge in charge of the Florida recount, that potentially changed the calculations rather substantially.

The previously undisclosed notes lend firm documentary support to recent comments by Lewis that he might well have expanded the Florida Supreme Court-ordered statewide recount of “undervotes”—the disputed ballots in which machines did not record any vote for president. The notes show that—just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its order—Lewis was actively considering directing the counties to also count an even larger category of disputed ballots, the so-called “overvotes,” which were rejected by the machines because they purportedly recorded more than one vote for president.

This is the group of disputed ballots that the consortium has now found that—had they been manually recounted—might have yielded a rich treasure trove of votes for Gore, enough even to put him over the top.

“Judge, if you would, segregate ‘overvotes’ as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter,” Lewis wrote in a note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the Charlotte County Canvassing Board on the afternoon of December 9, 2000. “I will rule on the issue for all counties, Thanks, Terry Lewis.”

The issue had arisen that crazed weekend in December because many of the statewide canvassing boards found themselves confused when they sat down to implement the State Supreme Court order. The court’s opinion directed them to visually inspect and then manually recount their “undervotes” to see if any of them reflected “the clear intent of the voter”—the standard the court said was the guiding principle of state election law.

One of those so confused was the canvassing board of Charlotte County, in southwest Florida. In a memorandum faxed to Lewis in Tallahassee at 1:49 p.m. that Saturday, Woodard, chairman of the board, noted that, under its optical scanner voting system, Charlotte county had more “overvotes” than undervotes. “This can result from a number of reasons,” Woodard wrote, and then added: “but a manual review of the ballots can in many overvote instances determine the ‘clear intent’ of the voter.”

Woodard wanted to know: “Is the Board restricted to the ‘undervotes’ or should the Board manually review the overvotes?”

The Charlotte County board wasn’t the only one posing the question. Faxes located in the files of the Leon County courthouse where Lewis sits show that other canvassing boards were confronting the same issue—and dealing with it in different ways. One canvassing board, in Lafayette County, faxed a letter to Lewis at 12:48 p.m. that afternoon informing him that they had already twice counted its “overvotes” by hand and were recertifying its findings.

The chairman of the canvassing board in tiny Santa Rosa County even faxed a disputed “overvote” ballot to Lewis at 11:55 a.m. It showed a voter who had marked his ballot with an arrow pointing toward Bush and then also (apparently mistakenly) marked it with another arrow pointing toward Harry Browne, the Libertarian Party candidate. The voter then wrote over the arrow pointing to Browne the word “no.” The Santa Rosa board requested Lewis’s “immediate opinion” on whether such a ballot should be counted—even though it wasn’t an “undervote.”

Lewis’s faxed handwritten reply: “For any votes like this, make a separate stack...and advise me in final report of those that you consider to be a ‘clear indication of the voters’ intent’ even though its not a non-vote or undervote.”

When first asked by Newsweek about the “overvotes” issue last April, Lewis directed a reporter to the faxed notes— and cited the uncounted Bush-Browne ballot in Santa Rosa County as a prime example of why “overvotes” should have been looked at. “I would have addressed that issue,” Lewis told Newsweek at the time, adding that he had even scheduled a hearing on the issue for the following day Sunday. (The hearing became moot once the U.S. Supreme Court stayed the recount at 2:45 p.m. Saturday.)

“Logically, everything the Florida Supreme Court said was, ‘You have to look at the clear intent of the voter,’” Lewis said. “Logically, if you can look at a ballot and see, this is a vote for Bush or this is a vote for Gore, then you would have to count it....Logically, why wouldn’t you count it?”

Note by Stewert: What this says is that judge terry lewis was going to order a statewide recount of all the undervotes and the overvotes and to count every vote where the intent of the voter was clear. Then gore would have won by 171 votes and the NORC report backs that up. The US supreme court stopped the recount one day before judge terry lewis was going to have a hearing and then order a statewide recount of all the under and over votes. This proves that Gore would have won if not for the US supreme court stopping the recount, it also proves the NORC recount evaluation spun the results to say Bush still won. Plus this proves the media is conservative, if the media was liberal they would report this story. WHICH THEY HAVE NOT REPORTED AT ALL ANYWHERE, it came out today (11-23-01) on the msnbc.com web site and not one word of it has been reported by the mainstream media.

Lewis has repeated that he planned to review the issue that weekend in interviews with others, including the Orlando Sentinel (which published them for the first time in a story on Nov. 12). And if he had so ordered the counties to count the “overvotes,” would that have made Al Gore president?

The news consortium review suggested the answer might be “yes.” As the consortium counted the ballots, Bush would have won the statewide recount of undervotes by 243. But the consortium found that a manual inspection of the approxmiately 113,820 overvotes yielded hundreds of extra votes for Gore—primarily because they occurred most frequently in counties with more black and lower-income voters who have less experience with voting and, in some cases, were apparently penalized by poor ballot design. By one consortium count, a full statewide count of both undervotes and overvotes would have resulted in Gore winning by 171 votes.

Then there is another small matter overlooked by the consortium: the numbers don’t add up. The consortium handed over the job of counting the disputed ballots to the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago, which in turn employed 153 ballot examiners to visually inspect the ballots in all of Florida’s 67 counties. In all, the NORC counters were able to inspect 175,010 disputed ballots that the counties identified as having gone uncounted or rejected. But those 175,010 uncounted votes are 1,436 ballots less than the 176,446 ballots that, the news organizations independently determined, had originally been reported by the counties as rejected or uncounted on election night. Note by Stewert: The numbers dont add up, where are the other 1,436 ballots ? My guess is a few republican operatives lost them in the recount process because they were gore votes.

What explains the discrepancy? Nobody can say for sure. Kirk Wolter, senior vice president at NORC, told Newsweek that each time the counties got asked to identify their uncounted ballots, they would come up with slightly different numbers. “Each time, they did it, it turned out a little different,” Wolter said. The Dade County elections supervisor last week told the conservative journal Human Events that election workers had difficulty trying to sort out ballots as they were run through county voting machines.

So does that throw a major league curveball into all the conclusions reported last week by the consortium? “I’m not going to quarrel with that,” Wolter said. “There’s certainly uncertainty about the results. There’s no question about that.”

Just like, the election itself.

http://democrats.com/display.cfm?id=181%20

Also:

Not That It Was Reported, but Gore Won
by Jim Naureckas

IN JOURNALISM, it's called "burying the lead": A story starts off with what everyone already knows, while the real news - the most surprising, significant or never-been-told-before information - gets pushed down where people are less likely to see it.

That's what happened to the findings of the media study of the uncounted votes from last year's Florida presidential vote. A consortium of news outlets - including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Tribune Co. (Newsday's parent company), The Wall Street Journal, Associated Press and CNN - spent nearly a year and $900,000 reexamining every disputed ballot.

The consortium determined that if the U.S. Supreme Court had allowed the ongoing recount to go through, George W. Bush would still likely have ended up in the White House. That's because the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court - as well as the more limited recount asked for by Democratic candidate Al Gore - only involved so-called undervotes, ballots that when counted mechanically registered no choice for president.

Gore and the Florida Supreme Court ignored overvotes - votes where mechanical counting registered more than one vote - on the assumption that there would be no way to tell which of the multiple candidates the voter actually intended to pick.

But as the consortium found when it actually looked at the overvotes, one often could tell what the voter's intent was. Many of the overvotes involved, for example, a voter punching the hole next to a candidate's name, and then writing in the same candidate's name.

Since the intent of the voter is clear, these are clearly valid votes under Florida law. And Gore picked up enough of such votes that it almost didn't matter what standard you used when looking at undervotes - whether you counted every dimple or insisted on a fully punched chad, the consortium found that Gore ended up the winner of virtually any full reexamination of rejected ballots.

So there are two main findings: The Supreme Court's intervention probably did not affect the outcome of the limited recounts then under way, and more people probably cast valid votes for Gore than for Bush.

If the first finding was the important news, the consortium was scooped long ago: The Miami Herald and USA Today, working as a separate team, published stories in April that argued persuasively that the particular recounts that were halted by the Supreme Court probably would have produced a Bush victory.

What's new is the finding that, since voters are supposed to decide elections rather than lawyers or judges, the state's electoral votes appear to have gone to the wrong candidate. Given that the outcome in Florida determined the national victor, this is not just news but a critical challenge to the legitimacy of the presidency.

So how did the media report the results of the ballot reexamination?Overwhelmingly, they chose to lead with the news that was comfortable, uncontroversial - and seven months old. "In Election Review, Bush Wins Without Supreme Court Help," was The Wall Street Journal's headline on its story, paralleling The New York Times' "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote." That angle would be fine if you believed that the Supreme Court was the most important aspect of the story; but what about the presidency?

Other members of the consortium emphasized the most Bush-friendly aspects of the story: "Bush Still Had Votes to Win in a Recount, Study Finds," was the Tribune Co.'s Los Angeles Times' main headline on its report, matching The Washington Post's "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush" and CNN.com's "Florida Recount Study: Bush Still Wins." The St. Petersburg Times' Web site put it succinctly: "Recount: Bush." While some of these outlets tried to convey greater complexity in subheads, all these headlines obscure the fact that the outlets' most comprehensive recount put Gore ahead of Bush.

Emphasizing the old and conventional while playing down the new and controversial is a recipe for being ignored, and sure enough, few outlets that were not part of the consortium did much with the findings. A story that may well be mentioned in high school history classes a hundred years from now didn't even merit an editorial comment from most newspapers.

It's tempting to attribute this coyness to Sept. 11, and news outlets' reluctance to undermine the legitimacy of the presidency when the country is at war. But the coverage of the consortium's findings is similar to the way earlier media recounts were handled; even the most preliminary Miami Herald/USA Today ballot stories prompted "Bush Really Won" stories across the country. Similarly, when Bush's inauguration was greeted by raucous marchers contesting his victory, many outlets played down the significance of the protests. The New York Times virtually ignored them.

War or no war, many journalists are instinctively protective of the legitimacy of the institutions they cover, but the job of a journalist is not to promote but to question. The theory behind the First Amendment is that the system will be strengthened by an unflinching look at the system's flaws. In looking back at the results of the Florida election, the media flinched.

Newspaper studies confirm Democrat Gore won Florida vote
By Patrick Martin
5 February 2001

Two newly published studies of the ballots cast in the US presidential election confirm that Democrat Al Gore was the choice of more Florida voters than Republican George W. Bush, who was installed as president after an unprecedented and anti-democratic intervention by the US Supreme Court.

One study was conducted by the Washington Post, the other by Tribune Co., which owns the Chicago Tribune, the Orlando Sentinel, and the Fort Lauderdale Sun-Sentinel. The Post endorsed Gore editorially in the November election, while the Tribune endorsed Bush.

The Post reviewed computerized records of 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida's largest counties to examine the pattern of the so-called overvotes, those ballots on which computer scanners or other vote-counting machines detected votes for more than one presidential candidate and discarded the ballots as invalid. The newspaper did not recount individual ballots, but relied on reports from county officials based on machine tabulation of the invalid ballots.

The analysis found that of the more than 60,000 ballots in the eight counties showing overvotes—the bulk of the statewide total—Gore's name was marked on 46,000, while Bush was marked on only 17,000. This includes several thousand ballots in which both Gore and Bush were marked.

The 3-1 Democratic to Republican ratio among the overvotes was confirmed in the analysis of other votes cast by those voters further down the ballot. Three quarters of those who improperly cast a presidential overvote marked their ballots correctly for US senator. Of these, 70 percent voted for Democrat Bill Nelson, only 24 percent for Republican Bill McCollum, while 6 percent voted for third-party candidates.

The nearly 30,000-vote margin for Gore among the overvotes dwarfs the 537 votes which was Bush's official margin of victory in Florida. On the basis of that minuscule and highly dubious number, the Republican-controlled state government, headed by his brother, Governor Jeb Bush, awarded him the state's 25 electoral votes and a four-vote margin in the Electoral College nationally.

The eight counties examined by the Post included Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Broward (Fort Lauderdale), Pinellas (St. Petersburg), Hillsborough (Tampa), Marion (Ocala), Highlands and Pasco. Four of these counties went for Gore and four for Bush. The pattern of more overvotes for Gore prevailed in all the counties, however, regardless of who won the county overall.

The notorious “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County accounted for 8,000 of the Gore overvotes, most of them double votes for Gore and far-right Reform Party candidate Patrick Buchanan, who was listed across from Gore on the ballot, with his punch-hole close to the names of Gore and Lieberman. Gore-Buchanan voters in Palm Beach County voted 10-1 Democratic in the US Senate race.

In the other seven counties, the largest group of overvotes were for Gore and the candidate who followed immediately after him on the ballot, Libertarian Harry Browne. Such a combination is incomprehensible as a protest vote, especially one supposedly chosen by 6,800 voters. It more likely reflects confusion among voters who thought they had to cast votes for president and vice-president.

Confirming the notion that the overvotes were largely intended for Gore is the fact that most of the third-party candidates on the ballot for president received more votes paired with Gore as overvotes than they did in their own right. In the eight counties, Socialist Workers Party candidate James Harris received a total of 300 votes, but his name was punched 12,600 times on ballots with Gore, Bush or another presidential candidate—42 inadvertent votes for each intentional vote.

The Republican head of the Florida Division of Elections, Clay Roberts, dismissed the Post analysis with an argument of stupefying cynicism, claiming that overvotes were intentional political choices. “People who are engaged in politics can't understand why people would overvote,” he said. “But there are valid reasons for undervotes and overvotes. For some voters, that undervote or overvote is their decision.”

The Post also found more than 15,000 voters in the eight counties who cast no recorded votes for any office or referendum. This suggests widespread difficulty with voting equipment, or major errors in the computerized count, or both, since it is impossible to believe that so many people turned out at the polls, many of them waiting hours in line, only to cast a blank ballot.

The Tribune Co. study examined ballots in 15 smaller counties—not including any of the eight in the Post study—that used paper ballots that were marked in pencil and then read by optical scanners.

While much public attention has been given to the punch card ballots that proved so defective in major urban counties, the rate of invalid votes was actually higher in these 15 counties, ten of which are predominately white and rural areas in north Florida. The reason is that these counties lacked the financial resources to have an optical reader in each precinct.

In the 26 counties that did have scanners available in each precinct, voters were instructed to put the ballot in the scanner themselves. In the event of an improper vote, the scanner rejects the ballot and the voter corrects the mistake and resubmits it. In the poorer counties, the ballots from each precinct are delivered to a central counting location. Voters who mark their ballots improperly have no chance to correct an error, since the mistakes are not detected until the ballots are fed into the scanner at the county seat. Their votes are simply discarded.

Counties with optical scanners in each precinct had a vote error rate of less than 1 percent. By comparison, punch-card counties had an error rate of 3.9 percent, and counties with optical scanners only in a central location had an error rate of 5.7 percent. In Gadsden County, the only black majority county in Florida, which used optical scanners at a central location, the error rate was 12.4 percent, and in some precincts as many as one vote in four was ruled invalid.

The poorest and least educated voters were obviously those most likely to make a mistake in casting their ballots. These voted overwhelmingly for the Democratic Party. As a result, the Tribune Co.'s recount of the 15,596 invalid ballots showed a gain for Gore of 366 votes, even though Bush carried 14 of the 15 counties.

A key factor in overvoting errors was the design of the ballot, almost as confusing as Palm Beach's butterfly ballot. In 13 of the 15 counties, the candidates for president were divided into two pages. Eight were listed on the first page and two, Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party and Howard Phillips of the Constitutional Party, on the second.

Some 4,252 voters cast ballots for Gore or Bush on the first page, and then for Moorehead or Phillips on the second page. If those votes had been counted for Gore and Bush, Gore would have gained 564 votes, more than Bush's statewide margin.

It is a curious fact that the designer of the two-page ballot, Hart InterCivic, is a consulting firm based in Austin, Texas, headquarters of the Bush presidential campaign. The company said it followed a format sent out by the Florida secretary of state, Katherine Harris, Florida co-chairman of the Bush campaign and a member of the cabinet of Governor Jeb Bush.

There were other anomalies. Officials in Lake County, who are Republican loyalists, ruled that a presidential ballot with two marks on it—one by the name, the other a write-in for the same candidate—was invalid, although state law allows them to be counted. The result was that 628 legal votes were discarded, votes which went disproportionately to Gore. Including these votes would have cut Bush's lead by 122 votes. Gore would have gained another 72 votes from similar double votes discarded in several smaller counties.

Lake County also printed the name of Joe Lieberman in small type directly above the word Libertarian in the party label on the line below. As a result, nearly 300 voters in Lake County cast ballots for Gore and Libertarian Harry Browne, which were ruled invalid.

The Post and Tribune studies have gone virtually unmentioned in the America media, except for the newspapers that commissioned them. Not a single prominent Democratic Party politician has taken note of their findings.

Speaking on a television interview program January 28, House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt repeated what has become the standard Democratic refrain. He said that in his opinion, Gore had won the most votes nationally and the most votes in Florida. But, he added, his opinion no longer mattered, and he accepted the legitimacy of Bush as president, following the Supreme Court decision of last December 12.

Such comments, and the ongoing silence over the evidence trickling in from Florida, demonstrates how far the Democratic Party is from any principled defense of democratic rights. Prostrate before the right wing, this big business party is incapable of defending its own immediate electoral interests, let alone the social and political interests of working people.