> What I'm sure about is that the Florida media consortium found that
> under all rational statewide recounts of contested ballots, Gore won,
> but not by much.
Actually I don't think that's true, Jenny. Robert Parry certainly acts like it's true. But his own account doesn't support him, IMHO.
I'll go into the boring details below just in case there is anyone nerdy enough to care. But for everyone else, I think the important argument is this. Even if you accept all the Democratic party arguments about the count, you would still be talking about a Gore victory by a couple of hundred votes. That's less than *1/400th of a one percent* of the total votes cast. There is no way anyone would ever take the word of an unofficial tally on a margin like that on an issue of such importance. And to make things worse, 25% of the vote -- 1.8 million votes -- were never actually recounted. The counties just resubmitted their original tallies. If 1/100th of one percent of those votes changed sides, it would wipe this out.
So proof this is not. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise no matter how much they jump up and down.
What reading these Parry articles convinces me of is my original point: that the big story is is not the recount, but the vote-rigging that preceded the count. The tiny number of votes involved in undervotes and overvotes is completely swamped by
-- the *thousands* of black voters who were wrongly *and clearly intentionally* stricken from the roles;
-- the *10 to 15 thousand* votes invalidated due to confusing ballots used in heavily democratic districts. On this point I was surprised not only by the size but by the unanimity among all the newspapers: Gore lost over 10,000 votes this way.
Those votes swamp the margin and make all the piddly vote counting details irrelevant. And these are the real issues. This vote was rigged and people were robbed of their right to vote. That's the outrage. And the racial angle should be played to the hilt.
IMHO, paying attention to the recount is a complete distraction. In the recount, both sides were partisan, one more effectively than the other, and no matter how you cut it, the final result is beneath any conceivable margin of human or machine error. Concentrating on this fires up partisans on both sides, but it wins over no one in the middle and leads to no calls for new laws. Those should be our two goals. And concentrating on what I've called the real issues would do more towards both.
IMHO, Unprecedented is a great example of this problem. It does fabulous work on the exclusions in the first half of the film, and then dissipates its force by concentrating on the final count and the court battles in the second. It's got some great footage of republican operatives in the mobs that it didn't want to throw out, and it's got some great stuff about how corrupt the Supreme Court is. But IMHO, all that ended up vitiating the real argument about what really won Bush the election. It wasn't SCOTUS or the mobs. It was the vote-riggers who preceded them.
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Okay, now for the boring nerdy details.
It is clear from the Parry articles you link to that what the film *meant* to say when it said "Only when the undervotes are counted would Bush have won" is "Only when the undervotes were counted *and the overvotes excluded* would Bush have won." However it leaves out why all the newspapers counted that way (and ran their headlines accordingly): because that's what the Florida Supreme Court said they should count, undervotes but not overvotes. So the papers assumed that, if the US Supreme Court hadn't intervened, and the statewide recount had gone ahead under the rules laid down by the Florida Supreme Court, that's what would have been counted. And Bush would have won. That's a perfectly reasonable position.
Parry has two objections to this <http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/120601a.html> (The film ignores it entirely. The reason for the incoherence of the cited concluding sentence is now clear. It didn't want to allow in any vitiating details, so it was forced to keep out details that were necessary to even understand what finally happened.)
Parry's first objection is that, as the two experts say in the film, overvotes *had* to be counted under the standard then in force under Florida law for handcounts, which is that any vote must be counted where the intent of the voter is clear. There's only one problem with that: the Florida Supreme Court clearly took a different view, and their view controls. Amateur legal second guessing is a weak reed to base your outrage on. Certainty this is not.
Parry's second objection is that there is evidence that the judge in charge of the recount was leaning toward changing his mind and eventually allowing overvotes to be counted.
Without going into the details, there is no way you can construe that argument other than to say that, if the state wide recount had continued, the overvotes *might* have been counted. So Gore *might* have won. There is no way you can say it would be certain -- either that the judge would have changed his mind, or that his change in view would have been allowed to prevail. One can say shoulda, coulda, maybe even probably -- but not "it is certain."
Michael