Gore's Victory by Robert PerrySo Al Gore was the choice of Florida’s voters -- whether one counts hanging chads or dimpled chads. That was the core finding of the eight news organizations that conducted a review of disputed Florida ballots. By any chad measure, Gore won.
Gore won even if one doesn’t count the 15,000-25,000 votes that USA Today estimated Gore lost because of illegally designed “butterfly ballots,” or the hundreds
of predominantly African-American voters who were falsely identified by the state as felons and turned away from the polls.
Gore won even if there’s no adjustment for George W. Bush’s windfall of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties and strict standards to Democratic ones, a violation of fairness reported earlier by the Washington Post and the New York Times.
Put differently, George W. Bush was not the choice of Florida’s voters anymore than he was the choice of the American people who cast a half million more ballots for Gore than Bush nationwide.
<snip>
But this outcome was not the favored hypothetical of the news organizations, which apparently wanted to avoid questions about their patriotism. If they had simply given the American people the unvarnished facts, the reality that the voters of Florida favored Al Gore might have bolstered the belief that Bush indeed did steal the White House. That, in turn, could have undermined his legitimacy during the current crisis over terrorism.
In its coverage of the latest recount numbers, the national news media also showed little regard for the fundamental principle of democracy: that leaders derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, not from legalistic tricks, physical intimidation and public-relations maneuvers.
It is that understanding that is most missing in the news accounts of the latest recount figures.
Presumably, the American people are supposed to accept that everything just turned out right – the Bush dynasty was restored to power, the proper order was back in place. Anyone who begs to differ is a “conspiracy theorist” or a “Gore partisan.”
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Al Gore FOUGHT for OUR WIN, ALONE, for 36 days. 36 days of being harshly ridiculed. 36 days of seeing through the partisan intimidation and lawbreaking of the GOP. 36 days of no one listening to him.
:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
ON EDIT: The New York Times article that reported on this clearly indicated, in pagraph 17, that Gore won 'by any standard so long as the entire state was recounted' - the editor later commented that they put the information in paragraph 17 because they did not want to undermine confidence in President Bush so soon after 9/11/2001. :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown: :thumbsdown:
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