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Paper: Gore Gained Only 49 Votes
By no surprise... no one will claim this! (Direct
descendent of Karl Marx)
Associated Press Writer FEBRUARY 26, 05:21 EST
MIAMI (AP) � A review of 10,644 uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County showed Al Gore would not have gained enough votes to overtake George W. Bush in Florida when those votes were combined with results from three other counties where the vice president requested manual recounts, a newspaper
reported.
(Nice headline "Free
Press", do you think maybe it should read, "FINAL IN FLORIDA: BUSH
WON"? This kills you guys, doesn't it! This is why the Supreme
Court put an end to it, along with the FACT that the "undervotes",
according to the rules and the LAW, were NOT countable, either for Bush or
Algore! After all of your huffing and puffing... NOTHING! - tha
malcontent)
Gore would have gained no more than 49 votes in Miami-Dade, The Miami Herald reported in Monday's editions. When combined with Gore's gains in Broward, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties, he would have not have overcome the Bush
lead.
(Bush won weeks ago
"Free Press", did you miss it? - tha malcontent)
The four counties used punchcard ballots, which state lawmakers are considering eliminating in favor of optical scanning equipment for the 2002 election in all 67 Florida counties.
The review, sponsored by the newspaper, its parent company Knight Ridder and USA Today, studied undervotes, or ballots where machines were unable to read votes for
president.
(Machines are not
Republican or DemocRAT, that's why they are the best way to count the votes of
the people and not some appointees placed by party leadership to
"divine" the intent of the voter, which is exactly what the "Free
Press" and the DemocRATS were attempting to do! - tha malcontent)
``There were many people who expected there was a bonanza of votes here for Al Gore, and it turns out there was not,'' Herald executive editor Martin Baron said
Sunday.
(How sad, Mr. Baron
doesn't even know he's part of the problem! - tha malcontent)
The newspaper found that 1,555 Miami-Dade ballots were marked in a manner that might be interpreted as a vote for Gore. An additional 1,506 bore some kind of marking that might be interpreted as a vote for George W. Bush. There were 106 markings for other candidates.
No markings for president were found on 4,892 ballots, and 2,058 ballots bore markings in spaces that had been assigned to no candidate. An additional 527 ballots were deemed to have markings for more than one presidential
candidate.
(And how much money and
resources were wasted in this attempt to de-legitimize PRESIDENT Bush? - tha
malcontent)
The Herald used broad liberal standards, including counting every dimple, pinprick and hanging chad identified in the section for presidential votes on the ballots.
Republicans said the Herald's results indicated that Bush was always the legitimate
winner.
(And it was like pulling
teeth for the "Free Press" to admit this! - tha malcontent)
``President Bush was lawfully elected on Election Day. He won after the first statewide machine recount,'' said Mark Wallace, a Miami lawyer for the Republican Party. ``He won after the manual recount, and he won at the conclusion of all the
litigation."
(Another possible headline
missed: "PRESIDENT BUSH WAS LAWFULLY ELECTED ON ELECTION DAY".
Don't be surprised if you don't hear much about this story from the rest of the
"Free Press" today. - tha malcontent)
Democrats said the review shows neither side could have known how the recounts would turn
out.
(DemocRATS ignored the
multiple CONSTITUTIONAL recounts that happened in the first place. Algore,
the DemocRATS and the "Free Press" tried to litigate a Presidential
win... PERIOD! - tha malcontent)
``This underscores how unpredictable the whole recount strategy was, on both sides,'' said Doug Hattaway, former Gore campaign spokesman. ``This shows Bush's tactics of delaying and blocking vote counts didn't really benefit
him."
(Are we going to get the benefit
of the BUSH response in this piece of journalistic tripe "Free
Press"? I certainly hope so! - tha malcontent)
The Herald and Knight Ridder retained a public accounting firm, BDO Seidman, LLP, to conduct the inspection, which took more than 80 hours spread over nearly three weeks.
A BDO Seidman accountant sat in the Miami-Dade elections office and recorded information about each undervote. The ballots were handled by elections officials. A Herald reporter also reviewed each undervote ballot and made a separate and independent assessment of its characteristics.
A research firm hired by several news organizations, including The Associated Press, The Washington Post, and The New York Times, also is reviewing 180,000 Florida ballots that did not register a vote for president during machine
counts.
(Tell me this is OVER!...
PAH-LEEEEEEEASE! - tha malcontent)
The Palm Beach Post previously released the results of its own review of 10,600 Miami-Dade undervotes. In that count, the Post found Bush gained six more votes than
Gore.
(This article is posted
under "Departments @ associalisticpress.com",
go read it! - tha malcontent)
The Post, which used a more restrictive standard than The Herald, concluded that Bush would have gained 251 votes and Gore would have gained 245 votes. No overvotes, or ballots where machines detected more than one presidential vote, were counted.
The certified results in Miami-Dade were 328,808 votes for Gore and 289,533 for Bush, according to the Florida secretary of state's office. Statewide, Bush won Florida by 537 votes out of about 6 million
cast.
(And we come to the end of this propaganda and of course it's no surprise that the BUSH camp got NO COPY in this article. Please AP, change your name to the DP, the DemocRATS Press! Bush won... Bush won... BUSH WON! - tha malcontent)
� Copyright 2001 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
(That depends on what the meaning of "may" is...
tha malcontent)
associalisticpress.com� and again and again!
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(This article is for all of you apologists for the DemocRATS and the attempted coup for a month after election day by Algore-ligula Caesar and his trial lawyers, after all of your pissing and moaning, Bush gained six votes in the heavily DemocRAT Miami-Dade County. What do you have to say for yourselves now? Now watch the "Free Press" ignore this story like they did the absentee ballots that favor Bush at least 6 out of 10 in this country not being counted in various states because it would not affect the individual states outcome! Not only is there NOT a popular vote in America, if we were to collectively count ALL votes, including absentee, Bush would have also won the "popular" vote as the "Free Press" calls it! Bush FACTUALLY won the electoral vote and 60% of the States "popular" votes... deal with it! - tha malcontent)
Miami-Dade ballot recount
By Clay Lambert and Bill Douthat,
Palm Beach Post Staff Writers
Sunday, January 14, 2001
MIAMI -- George W. Bush would have gained six votes more than Al Gore if all the dimples and hanging chads on 10,600 previously uncounted ballots in Miami-Dade County had been included in the totals, according to a review by The Palm Beach Post.
That result would have been a hard blow to Al Gore's hopes of claiming the presidency in a recount. Before the vice president conceded last month, the Gore camp had expected to pick up as many as 600 votes from a Miami-Dade recount -- barely enough to overtake Bush's razor-thin Florida lead. Instead, The Post's review indicates Gore would have lost ground.
If everything were counted -- from the faintest dimple to chads barely hanging on ballots -- 251 additional votes would have gone to Bush and 245 more would have gone to Gore, The Post review showed.
The review, concluded last week, also showed that the vast majority of ballots rejected as under-votes (meaning there was no clear punch for any candidate) when counted by machine appeared, in fact, to cast no vote for president. About 7,600 under-votes had no mark at all on the presidential column, or in rare cases included multiple votes that defied judgment. Most of the voters who did not indicate a vote for president did punch choices in other races.
But at least 2,257 voters apparently poked at their ballot cards without properly inserting them into the voting machines. Miami-Dade County Elections Supervisor David Leahy said that's because the voters failed to follow directions.
Of these miscast votes, 302 more would have gone for Gore than Bush, under Leahy's theory.
Even if those votes had been cast correctly, however, it would not have changed the outcome of a presidential election that turned on 537 votes for Bush in Florida.
"In other words, Dade was a wash," said Ivy Korman, director of special projects for the Miami-Dade County supervisor of elections. "And, knowing our county the way that we do, that is why we didn't feel the need to do a manual recount."
Gore easily carried the county by more than 39,000 votes on Nov. 7. The certified results in Miami-Dade were 328,808 for Gore and 289,533 for Bush, according to the Florida secretary of state's office.
Counts' results will vary
The Miami-Dade canvassing board abandoned its manual recount Nov. 22 after counting 140 of the county's 616 precincts. And four teams of judges in Leon County were about halfway through Miami-Dade's disputed ballots Dec. 9 when the U.S. Supreme Court stopped all recounts in Florida. No results were released from the judges' partial recount.
The Post's review of all the under-votes is the first of several planned or under way. Later this month, a consortium that includes The Post, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times plans to begin looking at the under-votes in each of Florida's 67 counties. The Miami Herald and USA Today are doing a similar review. The Herald/USA Today review, using accountants, is expected to be finished in Miami-Dade this week.
Because of varying judgments by reviewers on how each ballot is marked and the inevitable human error that occurs when thousands of ballots are examined by hand, results of the reviews by newspapers are almost certain to differ.
Furthermore, experts say no count -- whether done by hand or by machine -- will ever be exact. Computer industry consultants estimate the error rate for counting punch cards could run as high as 1 percent and varies with the number of times the cards are handled.
(For example, results changed in 313 of Palm Beach County's 531 precincts when the ballots were counted by hand.)
In the 37-day contest of Florida election results, Gore had hoped to find a mother lode of votes in heavily Democratic South Florida to overtake Bush. A manual recount in Broward County added 567 votes for Gore. Although it did not meet the deadline, the manual recount in Palm Beach County would have added 174 votes.
The Bush campaign contended the recounts were unnecessary because Bush won on Nov. 7 and in the mandated machine recount conducted Nov. 8.
Pattern in mis-punches?
In the Miami-Dade under-vote, the largest group of marked ballots was the 2,257 cleanly but inaccurately punched cards. During the media review, Leahy, the elections supervisor, demonstrated how many voters might have punched odd-numbered
chads, which didn't correspond to any of the 10 candidates for president named on the ballot.
Miami-Dade elections officials assigned only even numbers to the presidential candidates -- No. 4 for Bush, No. 6 for Gore, No. 8 for Libertarian Harry Browne and so on.
Leahy showed that when punch cards were laid over the ballot booklets instead of inserted into the machine the arrow corresponding to Bush appeared to point to the No. 5 chad rather than the proper No. 4
chad. Likewise, the arrow for Gore appeared next to the No. 7 rather than the correct No. 6.
The Post found 1,023 cleanly punched holes at No. 7; Leahy speculates these may have been attempts to vote for Gore. There were 721 clean punches at No. 5; these could have been attempts to vote for Bush. The Post also found 129 more odd-numbered marks that were not clean punches, such as dimpled or partly detached
chads.
Miami-Dade elections officials have been aware since November that a small percentage of voters wrongly punched odd-numbered
chads. The Post's tally of 2,257 clean punches in the presidential column is about one-third of 1 percent of the 653,963 ballots cast in the county.
Korman said the instructions were clear and appeared in both English and Spanish on ballot cards and machines.
"You can lead some people to water, but you can't make them drink," she said.
Larry Klayman is chairman of Judicial Watch Inc., a governmental watchdog group conducting its own review of under-votes in eight Florida counties.
"These are interesting findings and point to the need for a new system," Klayman said. "The system we have is broken."
Klayman said his organization would intervene on behalf of a lawsuit filed Thursday by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the American Civil Liberties Union, claiming that irregularities in Florida's vote amount to a denial of the equal protection guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Question of equal protection?
Judicial Watch supports the claim that the NAACP and ACLU make regarding equal protection, but it does not support their claim that there is also evidence of racial discrimination in the outcome of the presidential election.
The Post review, however, found that the rate of voting mishaps was greater in black-majority precincts than elsewhere. While 1.6 percent of all votes cast countywide for president were not counted because they were considered under-votes, that rate was 2.7 percent in the 112 precincts with a black majority.
In the 24 precincts where a majority of voters were 65 or older, 2.1 percent of the voters cast under-votes, while 1.4 percent of the voters in the 217 Hispanic-majority precincts delivered under-votes.
For example, in Precinct 513 in northwest Miami-Dade, where blacks make up 96.3 percent of the registered voters, 7 percent (28 voters) miscast ballots.
Thomasina Williams, an attorney representing the NAACP and other civil rights groups suing the state and seven counties over the election, said black precincts in Miami-Dade could have had more problems because they may have been using older, less reliable voting machines and were assigned poll workers with less training.
"Predominantly black areas fall prey to that because they don't get the same service," said Williams, who filed suit in federal court in Miami Wednesday asking that the punch-card system be eliminated.
Miami-Dade elections officials were not available Friday to comment on Williams' claims.
The Post also found some voters used pens or pencils to shade or circle their choice for president. The outcome in such cases was a tie: 23 votes each for Bush and Gore.
Also among the ballots were 24 cleanly punched votes for Bush and 35 for Gore that had not been counted by the machines. One theory: The chads had been dislodged sometime after the initial machine count and during the seven occasions Leahy estimates in which the ballots were handled since the election.
Media review called waste
Republicans are conducting their own review of disputed ballots in Florida. Mark Wallace, a Miami attorney representing the state's Republican Party, said the media's review is a waste of time.
"It doesn't matter what the outcome is," he said. "The fact that we gained votes is fine and dandy, but the things you (The Post) counted didn't correspond with the law."
Calls to the Democratic Party were referred to the Democratic National Committee, which did not immediately return calls.
Staff writer Brian Crecente, database editor Christine Stapleton and clerk Janis Fontaine contributed to this story.
Copyright Palm Beach Post 2001
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