FReep Halibut Award-- Dishonorable Mention 
Posted on 11/11/2001 12:38:32 AM PST by Timesink
kausfiles
Surprisingly, the results of the media consortium recount of the Florida presidential ballots, scheduled for publication on Monday, haven't leaked out yet – and it's already Saturday night. But Joshua Micah Marshall's me-zine has a partial scoop. Marshall hears that the impending consortium tally will find that "[I]f you count overvotes, Gore would have won big." (Remember overvotes? They're ballots disqualified when the ballot-counting machine detects votes for more than one candidate. But they can be legal votes—if, for example, a voter marks the little circle next to "Gore" and also marks the circle next to "write-in" and writes in "Gore" also.)
Good news for the Gore team? Not quite. The barb, for them, is that they didn't ask that the overvotes be counted! Instead, their entire effort was directed at counting "undervotes," ballots on which no vote was detected by the machines, but which might have a partially perforated "chad" detectable by humans.
Relying on intercepted communications, Marshall predicts a massive self-exculpatory spin offensive by former Gore campaign aides, all designed to erase the impression that they foolishly ignored the very ballots that would have given them the presidency. Indeed, since the results are out Monday, this spin campaign has probably been underway for several days. There is a significant possibility it will succeed – Gore aide Ron Klain played the Washington Post like a fiddle earlier this year, for example. (Details here.)
To help avert this possibility, kausfiles inaugurates its branded Spinoculator ™ service, which provides both reporters and ordinary citizens with information that may protect them and their loved ones from misleading spin attacks.
In this case, the antidote to the looming Gore-team spin can be found in the transcript of the final U.S. Supreme Court hearing in Bush v. Gore. Several justices were concerned that the Florida Supreme Court's recount was focused on undervotes and ignored overvotes, even though some overvotes might be valid, a concern that had prompted Florida's chief justice to dissent. Here is the relevant excerpt from the dialogue between the Court and Gore's lead lawyer, David Boies [emphasis added]:
JUSTICE STEVENS. What is your response to the chief justice of Florida's concern that the recount relates only to undervotes and not overvotes?
MR. BOIES. Well, first, nobody asked for a contest of the overvotes. …
Later in the argument, the overvote issue comes up again:
MR. BOIES: … when you're dealing with overvotes -- and remember, this is a machine issue. When you're dealing with overvotes, the machine has already registered two votes. Now, there may be another vote there, a dimpled vote or an indented vote, that the machine did not register. But once you get two votes, that ballot doesn't get counted for the presidency.
JUSTICE BREYER. They gave an example. The example they gave in their brief was, there's a punch for Governor Bush, and then there's a punch for "write-in," and the write-in says, "I want Governor Bush." And so I think their implication is that that would have been rejected by the machine, but if you looked at it by hand, the intent of the voter would be clear. I don't know if there are such votes, but they say there might be.
MR. BOIES. There's nothing in the record that suggests there are such votes.
But there is plenty in the record, you now know, to suggest that the Gore team blew it by ignoring a trove of potentially valid Gore ballots. Resist all spin to the contrary!
P.S.: If the overvotes do turn out to be crucial, I told you so!
With regards to the last update about Gore winning Florida on overvotes, Mickey Kaus correctly notes that it all depends on what kind of overvotes. If tons of folks in Palm Beach voted for Gore and Pat Buchanan, we may know as a matter of logic that most of these were really Gore votes. But that surmise would be irrelevant in terms of those votes counting. On the other hand, if lots of people checked Gore's name and then also put down Gore in the 'write-in' section, then under Florida law those votes could have and should have counted.
Let me try to clarify this as much as I can.
As you certainly know, Talking Points has a powerful intelligence network with both HUMINT (human intelligence) and SIGINT (signals intelligence) capabilities. And through our aggressive tracking we've been able to monitor internal Gore mafia communications in advance of the Monday release of the data.
The word from Goreland is an aggressive push to rebut the argument that they did not ask for a count of overvotes. That tells me that the overvotes in question were countable overvotes. Otherwise the 'we did so want overvotes counted' spin would be irrelevant.
Here's one other tidbit: two prominent Gore field operatives are telling fellow Gore-ites that the debate within the New York Times at the moment is over how definitively to say that Gore would have won. Whether he definitely would have won or whether he probably would have won. There also seems to be a lot of intra-Gore camp spinning, with HQ folks like Tad Devine and Monica Dixon successfully putting the blame on the Florida field team for whatever screw-ups took place.
So, as we've seen with the FBI and CIA recently, intelligence intercepts are sometimes hard to interpret. But that's what I glean based on the information I have.
The word I'm getting from within the Gore campaign is that the recount results to be revealed Monday show ambiguous results for all possible ways of counting the ballots.
With one exception, and it's a big one. If you count overvotes, Gore would have won big.
That's the scoop.
But I don't think the public wants to go back over this ground and if the media and the Dems harp on it too much there will be a backlash. All it will boil down to for now is that Gore will be more encouraged to run again. This story will have a one week life span.
- did they factor in the panhandle vote that got dissed?
- did they recount ALL of Dade or stick with just the Dem' districts, not wanting to count the Republican Cuban vote again (wonder how many Cuban's overvoted for Bush twice?)
- How much did they factor in for the lost Military vote?
- Did this "recount" calculation factor in "overvotes" (and "undervotes") for the entire country? Or are we just (belatedly) pretending "If we redid Florida only"? i.e. the same trick that Gore tried to do with Florida Dem Counties only.
Yup, batten down the hatches, but I don't think this "hypothetical" year late "what if" recount will amount to much.
FReep Halibut Award-- Dishonorable Mention
The NYT wouldn't commit to that unless they already knew what that "outcome" would be.
For the purposes of what, exactly? They can't anoint Gore king.
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And Duh! If Gore couldn't even manufacture a "win" in Florida, how the heck do you think he would do against bin Laden and his network of terrorists?
Oh is that ALL they have to do? Give me a break.
I'll be listening to Drudge tonight--he'll have the scoop. I believe Drudge said some time ago (or maybe it was Rush) that the NYT has had this story for a while and were set to run it in Sept., but backed off it after 9/11. They should back off it permanently, but they are sick.
So this means that to the NYT: a voter that voted for both Bush and Gore, or both Gore and Pat, or both Pat and Bush, really meant to vote for Gore!
Is Miss Cleo moonlighting at the NYT?
Tempest in a teapot.
Yawn.
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If these weasels from the newspapers do what I think they're going to do, they will destroy their franchise with the American public. Doing this now -- undermining the presidency in time of war -- is the most obtuse, blatant act of politcal partisanship imaginable. They will suffer horribly if they do this, and they will deserve it.