Corrections: In Which The New York Times Perpetuates the Myth It Created -
That George Bush Won Florida in 2000
By Larry Beinhart
Created May 27 2008 - 10:18am
"In 2001 painstaking postmortems of the Florida count, one by The New
York
Times and another by a consortium of newspapers, concluded that Mr. Bush
would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted
throughout
the state had been retallied."
-- Alessandra Stanley, New York Times, May 23, 2008 in a review of the
HBO
television movie, Recount
That's not true.
The New York Times did not do its own recount. It did participate in a
consortium. Here's what they actually said:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single
standards,
and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore
would
have won, by a very narrow margin."
-- Ford Fessenden And John M. Broder, New York Times, November 12, 2001
Why did Ms. Stanley make such an im****tant and fundamental error?
It is not a trivial matter. It is a common piece of misinformation. Many,
many people believe it. Now a few more do, as a result of Ms. Stanley's
review.
It is not a trivial matter. Because that misinformation was created by one
of the most bizarre, and still completely unexplained, journalistic events
in modern times.
Here's what happened.
George Bush appeared to have won Florida, and therefore the presidency.
The law in Florida was actually quite simple and direct:
f(4) If the returns for any office reflect that a candidate was defeated
or eliminated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast for such
office, ... the board responsible for certifying the results of the vote
on
such race or measure shall order a recount of the votes cast with respect
to
such office or measure.
That is one of the simplest and most clearly written bits of legislation
I've ever seen anywhere.
The Florida court thought so too and ordered a recount.
Then the United States Supreme Court stepped in and shut the recounts
down.
Bush was left as the victor and became the president.
But, presumably, the whole world wanted to know who actually did get the
most votes. It would make a great and im****tant story. But getting the
truth
was too time consuming and expensive for any single news organization, so
a
consortium was formed. It consisted of The New York Times, The Wall Street
Journal, The Tribune Company, The Wa****ngton Post, The Associated Press,
The
St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN.
It took almost a year and cost over a million dollars. And here are the
headlines:
All the news organizations had the same information: Al Gore got more
legal,
countable votes than George Bush.
Here are the headlines:
The New York Times: "Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did
Not Cast the Deciding Vote."
The Wall Street Journal: "In Election Review, Bush Wins Without Supreme
Court Help."
Los Angeles Times: "Bush Still Had Votes to Win in a Recount, Study
Finds."
The Wa****ngton Post: "Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush"
CNN.com: "Florida Recount Study: Bush Still Wins."
The St. Petersburg Times: "Recount: Bush."
If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read
the
stories, it didn't get much better.
I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph,
until
I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back
and read all the stories.
The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection.
They spent the first three paragraphs sup****ting the headline and they
explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount.
Finally, in the fourth paragraph - if you got that far - was the statement
quoted above:
"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single
standards,
and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore
would
have won, by a very narrow margin."
There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida
than George Bush.
It is also very well buried. It had arcania about chads on both sides of
it.
Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it
mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Times dismissed
what the Consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these
are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation.
There was no set of cir***stances in the fevered days after the election
that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and
undervotes." Even though that would seem to be a fairly obvious
interpretation of the law and it is what was found when someone actually
did
sit down and count the votes.
The rest of the story, another four paragraphs, detailed a variety of
other
possible recounts, all partial recounts - these counties, but not those
counties - that the Gore lawyers or the Bush lawyers asked for at various
times. Bush would have won all of those variations, he just didn't get the
most votes in Florida.
Not that the all variations mattered much. The Florida court had ordered a
state wide recount.
The news story spinners hung their hat on a technicality.
Florida law, as affirmed by the courts, says a vote most be counted if
there
is "a clear indication of the intent of the voter."
When the questions and lawsuits started, they were about undervotes.
An undervote is when a voter has tried to vote but for some reason the
counting machines fail to accept it.
The most common cause, in Florida, which used a punch system, was that the
punching device did not make a clear hole in the voting card. The piece of
paper that was supposed to be knocked out, a chad, was hanging, or only
broken on two corners, or merely dented.
While the machines couldn't discern the "intent of the voter," the human
eye
often could. So we had the spectacle, and the jokes, about "hanging
chads,"
as the recounts began.
If only the undervotes were counted, by some standards of judging them,
then
Bush would have won.
But the consortium recount came across something else - overvotes.
An overvote is when someone punches in the name of the candidate, and
then,
just to make sure, writes their name on the ballot. The machines could
only
read that the ballots had been marked in two places and threw them out.
But a human being, who saw that the place to vote for Gore had been
punched
and then, that Gore's name had been written in, could easily determine the
intent of the voter.
So the re****ters for the consortium kept track of those too, and found out
that Gore actually won.
Had the people inspecting the votes in the actual recount, also noticed
overvotes, and would they have done something about them?
The answer appears to be yes.
Newsweek has uncovered hastily scribbled faxed notes written by Terry
Lewis,
the plain-speaking, mystery-novel writing state judge in charge of the
Florida recount, ....
-- just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its order--Lewis was
actively considering directing the counties to also count an even larger
category of disputed ballots, the so-called "overvotes," which were
rejected
by the machines because they pur****tedly recorded more than one vote for
president. ....
"Judge, if you would, segregate 'overvotes' as you describe and indicate
in your final re****t how many where you determined the clear intent of the
voter," Lewis wrote in a note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the
Charlotte County Canvassing Board on the afternoon of December 9, 2000. "I
will rule on the issue for all counties, Thanks, Terry Lewis."
-- Newsweek, The Final Word? Michael Isikoff, 11/19/01
That leaves us with a big question.
The largest, most prestigious news organizations in the United States -
pretty much in the world - discovered a great and exciting story - the
wrong
guy was president of the United States.
Also, that the Supreme Court of the United States had interfered in an
election to frustrate the actual will of the voters. (Justice Scalia wants
us to get over it.)
Why did they so distort the story with misleading headlines, by burying
the
lead, by blowing so much fog and confusion around it, that almost
everybody
who read or heard the story, walked away with the false impression that
they
had deliberately created?
Created so successfully that the NY Times TV show reviewer is repeating it
as fact seven years later.
There is no hard, on the record answer to that.
None of the editors or publishers have come forward and said, "This is why
we spun the story the way we did, even if it meant pissing away the
million
dollars we spent to get it."
Nobody has, and nobody can, sue them for gratuitous misinformation and
malfeasance, and put them in the witness box under oath to get to the
bottom
of it.
There is only speculation.
The story is dated November 12, 2001, just two months after September 11,
2001. We can imagine that they universally felt it was not the time to
announce a pretender was on the throne and that the system was rotten,
right
to the top.
But I sure would love to know how they all got on the same page about it.
That would make a terrific story. Not as great as the one they threw away,
but good enough.
I would also have liked the Times to issue a correction to Ms. Stanley's
story. I wrote and suggested one. At the time that I've submitted this,
none
has appeared.
_______
--
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an op****tunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are
at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
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