RateItAll: The Opinion Network

Gore's lawyers were trying to have as of yet uncounted absentee ballots from the MILITARY thrown out. Lets not get crazy here.

If that was true then they wouldv'e taken him out of office.

He certainly won the election. What he didn't win was an overwhelming mandate to turn American government on its head, which is exactly what he has done. When you don't win the popular vote, and then you don't govern like you said you're going to govern - then, I believe, you have a problem.

The Miami Herald, which has carried out its own review of uncounted ballots in Miami Dade county said Mr Gore would have picked up only 49 extra votes there. Combine that with gains for Mr Gore in 3 other counties that used punchcard ballots - Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia - these would not have been enough to overtake Mr Bush. Of the 10,644 ballots identified as undervotes, the review found that 1,555 bore some kind of a marking that might be intrepreted as a vote for Mr Gore and an additional 1,506 bore a marking that might be interpreted as a vote for Mr Bush. (There were 106 markings for other candidates) We hear so much about disenfranchised voters but how does the stolen election crowd respond to a case of ballot disqualification engineered by political hacks? Not very loudly, it seems. The anti military absentee ballot challenges were inspired and in many cases led by the Democratic lawyers Gore retained. The NY Times, no friend to the Republican party, did an analysis on the treatment of overseas absentee ballots. A 1986 federal law allows Americans living abroad who fail to receive state absentee ballots to cast a generic federal ballot. A 1980s consent decree forced Florida to end a rule disqualifying overseas ballots that do not have an Army Post Office, Fleet Post Office, or overseas postmark. (Does anybody remember the memo faxed by Mark Herron, a key member of Gore's post election legal team? The November 15 memo outlined the new strategy for challenging military ballots) Gore's lawyers were determined to block as many military ballots as possible. In counties won by Mr Bush, 29% of the overseas ballots were disqualified. In those captured by Mr Gore, the figure was 60%. A federal judge later held that hundreds of overseas ballots were improperly thrown out either because they failed to carry an overseas postmark or because officials had no proof that voters who were using the generic federal ballot had met the deadline for requesting absentee ballots. A 2001 USA Today study found President Bush would have won the Florida recount. George W Bush would have won a hand count of Florida's disputed ballots if the standard advocated by Al Gore had been used. Bush would have won by 1,665 votes, more than triple his official 537 vote margin, if every dimple, hanging chad, and mark on the ballots had been counted as votes. (Dennis Cauchon, Special Report Newspapers' Recount Shows Bush Prevailed In Fla Vote, USA Today, 4/4/01) On November 12, 2001 the following news organizations had this to say: The Associated Press: A vote by vote review of untallied ballots in the 2000 Florida presidential election indicates George W Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore. CNN said: A comprehensive study of the 2000 presidential election in Florida suggests that if the US Supreme Court had allowed a statewide vote recount to proceed, Republican candidate George W Bush would still have been elected president. The NY Times: A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the Untied States Supreme Court did not award the election to Mr Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr Gore. A close examination of the ballots found that Mr Bush would have retained a slender margin over Mr Gore if the Florida court's order to recount more than 43,000 ballots had not been reversed by the United States Supreme Court. Even under the strategy that Mr Gore pursued at the beginning of the Florida standoff, filing suit to force hand recounts in 4 predominantly Democratic counties, Mr Bush would have kept his lead, according to the ballot review conducted for a consortium of news organizations. So according to CNN, The Associated Press, the Miami Herald, USA Today, and the New York Times, George W Bush did not steal, nor was he awarded, the presidency. UPDATE: I'm going to keep reposting this until it finally sinks in that under our current system the popular vote does not determine the winner of the presidential election. If you don't like it then change the system. Until then, learn to be a gracious loser.

When the New York Times,one of the most liberal papers in the country,admits G.W. won fair and square,which he did,there should be no arguement!

it was a mess in florida, a state governed by HIS LITTLE BROTHER

How can you loose an election when you win according to the rules and not because sore loosers want to change the rules after the fact. The constitution says that the candidate with the most votes in the electorial college wins the election. That what happened, so why are people still crying about it. It is a mute issue, if you don't understand the rules, then don't complain about them.

He might have won he might not have won but the fact of the matter is he's president.

Bush did not really win the 2000 election, but there are more important reasons why you shouldn't vote for him in 2004.

This is not a very good reason not to vote for the man. It may be a reason to throw him out of office, but it is a little late for that now. The entire 2000 election was a farce, with GOP thugs preventing people from voting, and the state of Florida eliminating thousands of Democratic voters from the list simply because they shared a last name with a convicted felon. Numerous other frauds were committed, and the Bushes stole the election and invalidated democracy in the United States. This is not exactly 'water under the bridge' because there should not be a statute of limitation on a crime of this magnitude, and in a just world Bush would go to jail for the rest of his life, but pick any one of the hundreds of other reasons not to vote for Bush in 2004. And there are hundreds of reasons to throw him out of office, and very few reasons for voting him back in. And there is nothing 'alleged' about it. He lost the election, and used his father's contacts to halt a recount which was increasingly in Gore's favor. Bush is illegitimate.

the last time i checked, he got more electoral votes than al bore. the bluehairs in florida need to pay more attention to who they are voting for, and for god sakes, get rid of the dangling chad. after all, it's not like it was the first time they voted.

Take a history class and review what is the resulting factor in Presidential elections. The accurate statement for you to make is that Pres. Bush did not win the popular vote. Gore did. Bush won the electoral vote which is the deciding factor in US presidential elections. It was the third time in our history as a nation that the election has been decided in such a manner. Had the situation been reversed and Bush won the popular and Gore the electoral, Gore would be president and rightfully so.

Whining is not a good strategy on trying to win the White House.

Water under the bridge. Vote or don't vote for him based on what is going on now.

Very true, but not a strong argument. We need to focus on issues, rather than pure rhetoric, to get this tyrant out of office.

We shouldn't be debating whether or not Bush won or lost the 2000 election. The bottom line; it was an awfully close election. Gore won the popular vote by 500,000 votes out of nearly 103 million cast! His popular vote margin was one of the narrowest in American history. Bush won in the electoral college because the state of Florida went for him by 531 votes. Even if Gore had won, the country would have been very divided, there was no way around it. It was a close vote and both sides could point to slight indiscrepencies that could have added more votes to either's totals. The bottom line: Gore's strategy of cherry picking counties throughout Florida for a hand recount was not legal. Under the Florida constitution, only a machine recount is required when the vote goes down to 1/10th's of 1 percent. The Gore campaign claimed that since the machines could not read paper ballots that had chads, the recount had to be done manually; a rather tedious process. The Bush campaign was in the right legally when they claimed that only the machine count would do, but the Democratic Florida Supreme Court allowed for it to go on anyways. Florida's electoral system is feudal with local and state municipalities battling for power. There is no cohesive body of election law in Florida, most of that is determined at the local level. Out of all the states close enough to determine the election, Florida was the worst one to have a legal battle. Many court cases were proceeding throughout the state at the same time and many times the rulings overlaped one another; no the recount couldn't continue statewide, but it can continue in Broward county. This leads me to Palm Beach county and the issue of the butterfly ballots. Some Gore voters complained that the ballot was confusing and they ended up voting for Pat Buchanan of all people. Although Buchanan got 2,000 votes in Palm Beach, simply put, there was no way to verify whether these people intended to vote for Gore or not, being that these ballots were anonymous. Bush won the presidency on the basis of the supreme court ruling that decided to effectively end the recount mess in Florida; it was a 5 to 4 victory for Bush going down party lines within the court. We need to move on beyond the partisan rancor that this election caused; our choice for president must be made on the merits of the Bush administration and whether it's done it's job or not.