The following quote is demonstrably false. Try actually reading the article you conveniently don't site or refernce, Dick.
I find it ironic that people say that Gore won even though a study conducted by the New York Times and Gore himself concluded that had a full recount been conducted, Bush would have won the state by a wider margin then he did on Nov 2.
The NY Times article actually said if a state-wide recount was done Gore would have won by a wide margin under any scenario. Only if the 3 county recount limited to under votes (hanging chads) was done would Bush win. There were some 40,000 legal irrefutable recoverable over votes with matching write-in candidate that were specifically addressed and required to be counted by Fla. law. Gore would have won by tens of thousands of votes, not the ficticious razor thin margin conviently certified by Bush's own campaing manager. The gap for Gore widens under every category of the 180,000 uncounted votes considered. The raw data of the joint media sponsored investigation is available online, or you can just read the conclusions of the sponsoring papers.
This doesn't even consider the outright illegal acts and dirty tactics, or the other voting mishaps.
It really angers me that reactionary right-wing fanatics continue to spout this lie as if it were gospel.
There was no clear winner from FL because it all depends on how you would evaluate the ballots that voters failed to complete properly.
Do not equate all overvotes to countable votes. >95% of the overvotes had 2 to 10 candidates selected. As you may remember, the NY Times was part of a consortium of newspapers that reanalyzed every overvote and undervote ballot and you can download the data on the web.
http://www.norc.uchicago.edu/fl/index.aspEach ballot was viewed by at least 2 observes, they only agreed on what they saw 60% of the time!
The Miami Herald did an independent analysis and you can download data from their web site as well.
It is quite clear there were only a few thousand ballots where the "clear intent of the voter" was apparent among the more than 170,000 ballots analyzed.
I down loaded both data sets and analyzed them. The most amazing thing in reviewing the ballots is how many ways voters failed to follow directions and therefore wasted their own vote. After seeing how many wacky ways voters filled in the optical scan ballots, there is no way to be sure if dimples and pinpricks mean anything. Excluding pinpricks and dimples, there were anywhere from 5000-7000 recoverable votes (again depends on how you want to count them. For example when a voter put an X over Gore's name on the optical scan ballot, did this mean he wanted to vote for Gore or he intensely disliked Gore? The additional votes slightly favored Gore. By my analysis these would have reduced Bush’s lead from 537 to about 200.
But don't tak emy word for it (or the NY Times for that matter) down load the data and do your own analysis
