I heard on right wing radio the other day that 6-7 million people illegally voted in the 2012 election...
Don't be on the level of them, or the liberals who don't believe Bush actually won Florida.
Yes...because these claims are totally equally ridiculous. It's not as if one has zero backing and is simply racist propaganda, whereas the other one invokes a complicated scenario involving several unresolved disputes surrounding a poorly designed ballot, voting machine malfunctions in the poorest most Democratic towns, a voter purge aimed at African Americans, and various hanging chad. Nope it's not like that at all, great analogy ElectionsGuy!
So you think Gore won Florida?
More than likely, Al Gore got more votes in Florida. If you did a manual recount of every vote, Al Gore beat Bush by something like 100 votes. But, it's academic at this point.
Depending on how strict a recount would be over deciding whether each individual undervote and overvote had enough evident voter intent to be counted or not, you could get an extremely narrow win for Bush or an extremely narrow win for Gore. Not that it matters at this point.
Now, if you fixed the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County and fixed the ballot in Duval County which misled people into voting for two presidential tickets (by putting the text 'vote on every page' on the bottom of each page of the ballot, and then spreading the choices for president over two pages), then Gore would have likely gotten the narrow victory regardless of how strict undervote/overvote counting happened to be.
However, it should be noted that turnout went down dramatically in the final hour of voting in FL in 2000 because they were misled by networks saying that the polls were closed in Florida when in fact polls in the panhandle were still open. If the networks had waited until 8 P.M. EST (as they do today) to say that FL polls were closed on Election Night 2000, and assuming that that made turnout between 7-8 P.M. consistent with an average hour's turnout on that day, Bush would have won by a pre-recount margin of 10,284 (1,784 (Margin by which Bush won actual 2000 ELECTION NIGHT (pre-recount) vote count + 8,500 (estimated amount the turnout increase increases Bush's victory margin by) (0.17%). If we factor in the recounting that was actually done in 2000, the victory margin goes down to 9,037 (537 (2000 FL certified Bush Victory Margin) + 8,500) (0.15%). Unfortunately for Gore, there is no combination of ballot fixing remedies, recounting of normal votes, and counting/recounting of certain undervotes/overvotes that is even remotely likely to make up that difference.
So, who probably won among the votes that were actually cast (if each vote had been cast as actually intended)? Gore
But, who probably won if we add in the votes that likely would have been cast if the networks had not misled people as to the poll closing time of the FL Panhandle? Bush
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Overall, I didn't like Bush as a president, but I prefer to blame Ralph Nader for his win in 2000 - if he (Nader) hadn't been in the race, Gore would have won FL by about 1.5-2 points or so (some Nader votes would refuse to vote for Gore and simply stay home in a two-way race).