Tally No! Miami Herald’s Recount Results were Sloppy, Incomplete

In late December, the Orlando Sentinel took a look at about 3,000 overvotes in Lake County. The paper found more than 600 valid ballots that had been ignored by the machines, with Gore picking up 130 even in this heavily pro-Bush county. In late January the Chicago Tribune reported that in 15 Florida counties with a particularly high rate of overvotes, more than 1,700 votes that showed a clear choice had been discarded. Most of the counties in the Tribune’s study were small, rural and predominantly Republican. Yet even so Gore’s net gain was 366 votes. And a Washington Post review of the computer records of 2.7 million votes in eight of Florida’s largest counties reported that overvotes trended toward Gore at a rate of three to one.
Add these together, even with the new undervote count, and Bush is back cutting brush in Crawford, Texas, while Al Gore is your new president. But because it chose to ignore these legal votes in its own recount, the Herald/Knight Ridder effort is an expensive waste of time, useless for everyone but Bush/Republican propagandists. It will be a test of the media to treat these results with the critical scrutiny they deserve. (One paper which has already failed this test is USA TODAY, which ran the Herald results under the misleading headline, “Recount Study: Gore Still Loses,” thoughtlessly accepting the Herald’s flawed counting standards.)

I could envision a scenario where “defective” ballots were in the machines in the first place, punched for some second candidate, which would explain the existence of Bush and Gore overvotes at a rate of 3 to 1 for Gore in predomiantly Democratic counties, and effectively nullifying thousands of Gore votes. This is to say nothing of the “felons” disqualifications and intimidation that went on by placing “sobriety checkpoints” out ON ELECTION day. Why would there be such a decision on this day when it is important for people to GET OUT TO VOTE,. were it not a concerted effort to seek to influence a “particular” demographic?

All of this , added to the shenanigans already happening in Florida again (intimidation of black voters, computer , “Paperless” machines, Jeb sparring with the State Court again and placing Nader on the Ballot…..Jeb needs a good dose of “targeting by the media” himself, to begin to expose his own place along side his brother as a master deceptive, dark-side soldier.

I also remained pissed at the Florida judge who let slide an obvious violati on by a Republican group allowing Republicans to come in and “correct” mistakes on absentee ballots, and refusing to allow Democrats the same “corrections”. By law, NONE of the corrections were to be allowed. This also led to the “addition” of several Bush votes , the reverse of which would have led to a an almnost certain “different decision” by the judge.