Is it just me? Or is the media spin on the recount numbers oddly perverse? Most of the headlines run something like CNN’s “Florida recount study: Bush still wins.” One CNN story even said the study “showed George Bush winning even with a statewide recount,” which is actually precisely what the study did not show.
This AP lede states the point accurately and does perhaps the best job of laying out the actual findings in a clear and balanced fashion: the study, said AP, showed “George W. Bush would have narrowly prevailed in the partial recounts sought by Al Gore, but Gore might have reversed the outcome â by the barest of margins â had he pursued and gained a complete statewide recount.”
I’m going to comment in greater depth after I read all the articles and as much of the data as I can get hold of or endure. But for now, these comments …
Almost all of the headlines and articles place the emphasis on the legal strategy the Gore team adopted relatively late in the game, one which — in retrospect foolishly — discounted the importance of overvotes. I think the Gore people have a decent argument to the effect that they tried from the beginning to get a full statewide recount. But Katherine Harris and the Bush legal team made that impossible. And having gotten argued into a position where they had to make a tactical decision about where they thought the most votes would be, they made the wrong call.
But at this point, who cares? We know who won the election in the sense of who’s actually president. Nothing is going to undo that. We’ve also known for some time that the specific, limited recounts Gore lost in the United States Supreme Court wouldn’t have put him over the top. Maybe this means that Ron Klain’s a &#@$-up. But, again, for present purposes, who cares?
The only question that’s still out there is who really got the most votes. For the historical record, if all the votes had been accurately counted under Florida law as it existed at the time, who would have gotten the most votes in the state? And the study seems to say pretty clearly that that ‘who’ was Al Gore.
To me, that seems like the story.
