September 4, 2002
Gore Won Florida
As the first election after 2000 approaches, Lance deHaven-Smith, a professor of public administration and policy at Florida State University lays it down clearly lest we forget. Gore won Florida. (see Tallahasse Democrat) And he won the national popular vote. Gore won the election. The Bush mob, with its ground forces in Florida; its vast funding from Enron, Halliburton and other corporate thieves; with its manipulation of the law through the Supremely Corrupt Court, stole the White House and then proceeded to lead us into this mess.Written in a clear question-and-answer format, this article sums it up. "State election officials ultimately declared George W. Bush the winner by a margin of 537 votes," the article says, "but during and after the election dispute, questions remained about the uncounted ballots of 175,010 voters, ballots that had been rejected by error-prone tabulating machines employed in many Florida counties. Confusion and conflict, much of it generated by partisan intrigue, prevented these ballots from being counted during the election controversy. However, in 2001 every uncounted ballot was carefully examined in a scientific study by the University of Chicago, which concluded that when all the votes were counted, more votes had been cast for Gore than for Bush."
Major newspapers obfuscated that fact by emphasizing one particular possible scenario: "that Bush might have kept his lead if the manual recounts of machine-rejected ballots had been completed along the lines either requested by Gore or initially mandated by the Florida Supreme Court. In these recount scenarios, not all of the machine-rejected ballots would have been included. However, just before the U.S. Supreme Court intervened, the judge overseeing the final statewide recount was preparing to announce that the recount would cover all of the previously uncounted ballots."
And furthermore, the fiasco was in no way an accident. "The New York Times and The Washington Post discovered evidence that Florida's governor, secretary of state, and speaker of the House, all Republicans with close ties to George W. Bush, used their offices to manipulate the election controversy and secure Bush's victory. During the controversy, they collaborated either directly or through intermediaries with the legal and political advisers of George W. Bush to: (1) put pressure on the state's top law firms not to work for Gore; (2) bend the rules on absentee ballots to allow improperly marked absentee ballots to be counted; (3) block, stall or discredit manual recounts; and (4) create fears of a constitutional crisis so that the U.S. Supreme Court would intervene."
The Bush presidency was and still is and forever will be illegitimate.
-- By David Cogswell