[lbo-talk] Re: What's at stake?

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Fri Nov 21 05:22:40 PST 2003


On Thu, 20 Nov 2003 JBrown72073 at cs.com wrote:


> They got away with unbelievable shit in Florida--more than I thought
> they ever could, much more. See the movie 'Unprecedented.'

I have a question about this movie, which I saw recently. I thought it did a very good job of making its case -- until the very end, when I was completely baffled by their coverage of what they themselves call the "thorough analysis of Florida's unread ballots" by "a media consortium which included the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Orlando Sentential and the Los Angeles Times." The script runs like this:

<quote>

Dan Keating [Title: Washington Post Database editor]: Based on what is marked on the ballots, if you look at every ballot, it would indicate that more people voted for Gore.

Sean Holton [Title: Projects Editor: Orlando Sentinel]: We found anywhere from 2,000 to 25,000 ballots, out of these 175,000 ballots, were, in fact, legal votes.

Dan Keating: The reason why there's a lot of retrievable overvotes is this pattern, particularly on optical ballots, where people vote the candidate, and then they go to the bottom of the ballot, and at the bottom, it says "Write-In Candidate Name." Well, a lot of people followed that instruction. They wrote it in again.

Sean Holton: The state law that was in play during the election specifically says you have to count such ballots as votes.

[A picture then comes on screen of a Washington Post Headline that says "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush." The much smaller subhead says "But State Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of All Uncounted Ballots." I emphasize: Might]

Voice Over: It is only when the state's *undervotes* were counted that George Bush would have retained his lead.

<end quote>

That's the end of the factual argument. (After that we get general reflections.) And that last sentence left me completely baffled. Afaics, there was nothing in this film that ever suggested that undervotes were invalid. Aren't undervotes dimpled and hanging chads, which the film was in favor of counting? So if George Bush won counting all the votes in including those, doesn't that mean he would he would have won a careful statewide recount -- the most legitimate of all recounts?

The two guys who are the only guys quoted are clearly in the minority, or the headlines would have been the opposite. But what's the argument that won? It isn't even mentioned, never mind refuted.

I enjoyed the whole movie. I was really feeling my outrage stoked and my rhetorical armory stocked. And then I was completely brought up short by that ending, and doubly pissed when they just rushed on like nothing had happened. I felt they unravelled half their argument there and threw me back into the pit of "who knows?"

It seems the film concedes -- much to my surprise -- that Bush would have won the four-county recount that Gore asked for in the counties that they most expected to be Democratic. (They quote not one but several experts to that effect and none against it.) And the film then ends by noting (without explaining or refuting) that Bush would have won a statewide recount. (Which seems to make sense if he would have won the recount in the most Democratic counties.) To which I say: Huh?? If those two things are true, then all those spectacles I got outraged about -- the mob-rule prevention of recounts; the absurd VSOP Supreme Court opinion made by people who should have recused themselves -- seem to be so much extraneous noise. What do they matter if in a purer universe with a liberal court where people did the right thing, Bush still would have won?

There would still be one major argument left and well worth getting outraged about, and that is the large scale illegal exclusions of black people, which the film does a great job on. And if they'd made a film that concentrated on that it, would have been a clear and stirring call to action. But it also would have been a very different film -- it would have had nothing to do with the recount. It would have been entirely an issue of the pre-count.

Did the film just mess up? It there a good argument to be made that the consortium was a cover-up? If so, what's the case? And why didn't the film slam the commission instead of calling it "a thorough analysis?"

And can anyone tell me why "counting the state's undervotes" is supposed to disqualify Bush's election? Were they trying to say the commission counted the undervotes but not the overvotes, even when the overvotes were double the same vote? And that there were so many of those that those were the final margin of victory? That would have been outrageous, and a great ending. And if it was what they were trying to say, I don't know why they couldn't have spared five more minutes to say it. Shoving it under the rug like that if they didn't have to seems nuts.

Michael



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list