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=> Re: the advantages of owning the newspaper...

Re: the advantages of owning the newspaper...
Posted by Nobody (Guest) - Thursday, September 16 2004, 4:57:00 (CEST)
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"the recount was STOPPED when it became clear there was an excellent chance Bush would lose the state, an appeal to the Supreme Court to allow Democracy to reaffirm itself was denied and Bush was APPOINTED by nine people..."

Really...


December 10, 2003, 9:15 a.m.

Let the Sunshine In

The same old myths live on about Florida, Nov. 2000.

By John R. Lott Jr.

THE MYTH THAT GORE WOULD HAVE WON IF RECOUNT HAD ONLY BEEN ALLOWED
There were two news consortiums conducting massive recounts of Florida's ballots. One group was headed by USA Today and the Miami Herald. The other one was headed by eight newsgroups including the Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, the Associated Press, and CNN. Surprisingly, the two groups came to very similar conclusions. To quote from the USA Today group's findings (May 11, 2001) on different recounts:

Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten the manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush.
Who would have won if the U.S. Supreme Court had not stopped the hand recount of undervotes, which are ballots that registered no machine-readable vote for president? Answer: Bush, under three of four standards.

Who would have won if all disputed ballots — including those rejected by machines because they had more than one vote for president — had been recounted by hand? Answer: Bush, under the two most widely used standards; Gore, under the two least used.


Of course, Florida law provided no mechanism to ask for a statewide recount a la the last option, only county-by-county recounts. And of course neither Gore's campaign nor the Florida Supreme Court ever asked for such a recount.

4. DON'T FORGET THE EARLY MEDIA CALL

Florida polls were open until 8 P.M. on election night. The problem was that Florida's ten heavily Republican western-panhandle counties are on Central, not Eastern, time. When polls closed at 8 P.M. EST in most of the state, the western-panhandle polling places were still open for another hour. Yet, at 8 Eastern, all the networks (ABC, CBS, CNN, FOX, MSNBC, and NBC) incorrectly announced many times over the next hour that the polls were closed in the entire state. CBS national news made 18 direct statements that the polls had closed.

Polling conducted after the election indicates that the media had an impact on voter behavior, and that the perception of Democratic wins discouraged Republican voters. Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded Mr. Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the panhandle after Florida was called early for Gore. Another survey of western-panhandle voters conducted by John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling company, immediately after the election estimated that the early call cost Bush approximately 10,000 votes.

Using voting data for presidential elections from 1976 to 2000, my own own empirical estimates that attempted to control for a variety of factors affecting turnout imply that Bush received as many as 7,500 to 10,000 fewer votes than he would normally have expected. Little change appears to have occurred in the rate that non-Republicans voted.

Terry McAuliffe clearly stated his strategy "to use the anger and resentment that will come out of that 2000 election, put it in a positive way to energize the Democratic base." Democrats have used the notion that Bush is an illegitimate president to justify everything from their harsh campaign rhetoric to their filibusters against his judicial appointments.

More could be said about these myths, but most of them hardly merit discussion. Unfortunately, as Terry McAuliffe implies, these falsehoods will continue to be trumpeted frequently over the next year; thankfully, a few facts can help dispel them.



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