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.
