Okay, I think I get it now.
I think we are all agreed that calling "Do over!" on the election was never an option, and never could have been one, unless there had been decisive proof of electoral fraud on a large scale.
It is interesting to look back at some of the "debunking" materials that you quoted earlier. For instance, let us re-read this passage from John Fund's book, as quoted on a Web page (bold type added):
But in fact, every single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state's twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency. This includes a manual recount of votes in largely Democratic counties by a consortium of news organizations, among them the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times. As the New York Times reported on November 21, 2001, "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." The USA Today recount team concluded: "Who would have won if Al Gore had gotten manual counts he requested in four counties? Answer: George W. Bush."
Fund alludes to the Media Consortium Ballot Project when he says "This includes a manual recount of votes in largely Democratic counties by a consortium of news organizations, among them the Wall Street Journal, CNN, the Boston Globe and the Los Angeles Times." As we saw (see the quotations in my
post #73), that project did find that Bush would come out the victor under a manual recount in the counties selected by Gore. But the project also found that a recount in
all Florida counties would have yielded a victory for Gore. So Fund's first assertion, that "every single recount of the votes in Florida determined that George W. Bush had won the state's twenty-five electoral votes and therefore the presidency," is disproved by one of the documents that he himself cites -- or rather alludes to, as he does not explicitly identify it. (I have looked up the original passage in his book,
Stealing Elections, p. 28, and I can verify that he provides no further reference than is included in the quotation.) I can think of two possibilities here. One is that Fund did not know of the second finding (Gore's victory under a statewide recount), but only of the first (Bush's victory under a recount in the counties selected by Gore). The other is that he knew of both and either lied about it or was careless of the truth in a fashion as culpable as an out-and-out lie. The first option seems to me exceedingly unlikely.
To take up CL's assessment again:
The guy's a Republican hack - I'll bet $1 right now his book spends pages discussing the dead people that voted in FL in '97 without one mention of the many living citizens who weren't allowed to in 2000.
On the evidence just considered, I am inclined to agree that Fund is a Republican hack. However, I've got his book open in front of me to a section titled "Doubtful Disenfranchisement" (pp. 31-33), and I think you would lose your dollar if anyone took your bet. Fund acknowledges that "the database of the names of felons set up for the state by Database Technologies, a private company, contained some errors [!]," but claims that an investigation by "the liberal-leaning
Palm Beach Post" found no evidence that minorities were specifically targeted; on the contrary, it found that "the error rate was 9.9 percent for whites, 8.7 percent for Hispanics, and only 5.1 percent for African Americans" (pp. 31-32). He does not, however, provide a specific source. I turned up three articles in the said newspaper that mention Database Technologies, none of which contains these statistics. However, one article, titled "
Felon purge sacrificed innocent voters" (May 27, 2001), said that "Of the 19,398 voters removed from the rolls, more than 18,600 matched a felon by name, birthdate, race and gender." That is a much smaller number of voters than the 57,700 in the lists found by Palast. (The greater proportion of matches by name, birthdate, race, and gender may not be so significant, given that, according to Palast, non-matching characteristics were simply omitted from the purge lists, and 40,000 people were correctly identified on the list but had had their voting rights restored to them.) There is also an article from the next day's issue under the title "
Thousands of felons voted despite purge."
So things end up getting all murky again.
