Quote:
Originally posted by The Reaper
I would wager a small sum that more military votes were invalidated in the 2000 election than minority votes.
Can the UN monitor that as well?
They could just go to Iraq and collect the 140,000 votes there in person.
TR
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The question of absentee ballots by military members is just one of many issues the media didn't care about too much because they inured to Bush/Cheney's benefit:
Absentee ballots
Federal overseas ballots (the ones you get at your embassy or your overseas base arranges to get at the embassy) heavily skewer toward Republicans because most are cast by servicemembers or businessmen working abroad. They went Bush/Cheney, 63.3% and Gore/Lieberman 33.6%.
But federal overseas ballots are just one category of absentee ballots. Many military personnel cast regular absentee ballots that they or a family member obtain from their county election officials. There is no separate breakdown of these military ballots from absentee ballots from other sources and, indeed, there is no breakdown in the county-by-county statistics of absentee ballots from regular election day ballots.
The real scandal in absentee ballots was not the undercounting of military ballots, which hurt Bush/Cheney, but the likely overcounting of certain other absentee ballots which helped Gore/Lieberman. These included a number of cases where people went to nursing homes and "helped" the elderly voters express their almost uniform support of the Democratic ticket.
Excuse me, but your chad is dangling
Of course, the scandal we are all familiar with is that of the chad; that is, the undervotes, where the pin failed to penetrate ("dimpled chad") or fully detach the chad ("hanging chad"), and the overvotes, where more than one hole was punched. A third category is the invalid write-in, where someone punched a chad and wrote in a candidate, or where the write-in name was illegible.
But hidden in all that media talk of disenfranchised would-be Palm Beach County Gore voters who voted for Buchanan is this fact: the rate of overvotes/undervotes/invalid write-ins as a percentage of voter turnout in Palm Beach County was 6.43%. In Dade and Broward, the other two counties the Gore team and the media focused on, the percentages were 4.37% and 2.49%, respectively. Of the ten counties with the highest percentages of invalidated ballots, eight were heavily Bush over Gore. In Duval, for example, it was 9.23% (the statewide percentage was 2.93%).
In Palm Beach County, total voter turnout was 462,588, and 433,186 presidential votes were cast. Bush/Cheney took 152,951 (35.3%) and Gore/Lieberman took 269,732 (62.3%). Based on that percentage above, about 29,700 votes weren't counted. If we assume the breakdown of these would have been the same as those counted, and some voter intent could have been discerned from all of these invalidated ballots, Gore might have added about 18,500 votes in my home county and Bush might have added 10,500 or so.
But in Duval County, that 9.23% rate means that with a voter turnout of 291,626, some 26,900 votes weren't counted. Presidential votes totaled 264,636, with Bush/Cheney taking 57.5% and Gore/Lieberman taking 40.8%. Applying the same assumptions as above, Bush might have netted an additional 4,500 or so votes, erasing much of Gore's gains down south. In Collier County (the Naples area), the difference was starker - Gore might have gained 1,030 votes, but Bush would have gained almost 2,090.
Naturally, Gore's people weren't pushing for recounts in Duval or Collier Counties, or in any of the other heavily Bush/Cheney counties. Gore didn't want the hoped-for gains in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach erased by Bush/Cheney gains in places like Duval and Escambia counties.
There is no empirical reason to believe that a statewide recount of all those invalidated votes would have resulted in a breakdown between Bush and Gore greater than that from votes that were counted. I suppose the operating theory is that there were more incompetent Democratic voters than Republican voters, so a higher percentage of the overvotes and undervotes should have been Gore votes than Bush votes. That was certainly what was claimed in Palm Beach, where the stories were all of Gore voters who accidentally voted for Buchanan because of that infernal butterfly ballot. And of course, the Duval counterargument is that nefarious Republicans were invalidating Democratic votes to deliver the county to Bush (but the same argument could be made with regard to Palm Beach's Democrat-controlled election commission).
What time you got, mister?
There is one other scandal. of course - the Western Counties Time Zone Controversy. Ten of Florida's 67 counties are located in the Central Time Zone, one hour behind the rest of the state. The major networks began calling Florida for Gore before polls closed in these counties. All of these counties - Bay, Calhoun, Escambia, Gulf, Holmes, Jackson, Okaloosa, Santa Rosa, Walton and Washington - were overwhelmingly Bush/Cheney counties. Bush outpolled Gore 237,769 to 111,580 in these 10 counties.
It can never be known how many people on their way to a polling place at the last minute, or how many standing in line at a polling place at closing time, failed to vote once they heard the networks call the state. It may be that there weren't all that many, but even if it were one half of one percent of Bush voters in those counties, that would have added some 1,200 votes to Bush's total. Given the 537-vote difference between Bush and Gore, that would have been significant.
I haven't even addressed the 2,000 or so illegal votes in Florida in 2000 (people voting twice, felons voting, etc.), most of which seemed to be in the Democrats' favor.
In sum, the mythology of Florida 2000 is of disenfranchised Democrats and Bush "stealing" the election, when it may very well be that what really happened is that despite all their best efforts, the Democrats merely failed to steal the election themselves (unlike Wisconsin, where theft appears to have worked - Connie Milstein, a New York Democratic activist, was caught on camera bribing the homeless with cigarettes to vote for Al Gore, while some 361 felons were found to have illegally voted in Milwaukee County alone).
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