Why I think the BFEE did steal the 2000 election.

[Brian Sweat]

The official result of the voting in Florida have Bush ahead by 537 votes. This is less than .01% of the total vote. In my home town of Jacksonville about 26,000 ballot were spoiled. There are always a high number of spoiled ballots in counties that use punch card machines, but this number is much higher than normal for Duval country. In addition, thousands of people where illegally purged from the voting rosters because of bad convicted felon lists and thousands of FAMU and BCC students who signed up via motor voter registration were not on the precinct rolls. The vast majority of these people would have voted for Gore.

If you are the Bush campaign, you internal polling should have been telling you that Florida was a dead heat AT BEST.

On election night, when Mary Matalin was told that Florida has been called for Gore, she said that it wasn't right and that Florida was going to flip. No state has ever flipped before, but Matalin boldly predicted that Florida would flip. At the time, I thought she was just spinning the issue in the hopes that Bush might when some western states he wasn't supposed to win.

Then they showed the Bush family and told them that Florida had been called for Gore. The looks on their faces was sheer contempt. They refused to believe that Gore could have won Florida.

How could they be so sure that Bush would win Florida. There should have been no reason for them to believe that Bush was a lock in Florida. Most of the polls showed that Florida was a dead heat and the election proved it. There own internal polling should have also shown them this. I can only assume that they knew something the rest of us did not. The only thing I can think of that would have given them such convinction is if they knew the fix was in.

[samsingh]

1. you're right

On election night Bush said he would not concede Florida. how could he be so sure?

[montanacowboy]

2. Thank you!

we have been saying this all along - I especially remember the looks of the BEFEE's in their hotel room - like say what? they knew then that the fix was in. They gave themselves away right on the camera. The puddles of puke that they are.

[BeFree]

3. Don't you mean...

You KNOW they stole the election.

It's amazing to me the number of people I meet who think the same way. And they hardly even know about the votes for Buchanan from West Palm Beach. Even he was on TV saying something was wrong about that.

We can not let them steal another one.

[Brian Sweat]

8. I am also thinking about donning a tinfoil hat vis-a-vis black box voting.

In 2000 about 180,000 ballots were spoiled in Florida. Most of these occured in heavily Democratic precincts. For the most part, this is not unusual. This number is only slightly higher than the normal percentage. However, any technology that prevents people from accidently spoiling their ballots would significantly improve the Democrats chances of winning elections. So much so, that it would create an electoral nightmare for Republicans.

In the past the fact that so many Democratic ballots are spoiled has really been an advantage for Republicans. Taking away this advantage would have cost them every close state in 2000 and Gore probably would have won the overall popular vote by about 2,000,000. Cheating may be the only way that they can win presidential elections in the future.

[SavageWombat]

4. In fairness, I disagree

Remember that lots of right-wingers are convinced that voter turnout in the panhandle was depressed because of the early call. In other words, they were convinced that the panhandle was so conservative that it would throw the state to them. So they may have expected that the later results would have shifted the trend of such a close race in their favor.

Now, I do think they stole Florida's votes - I just don't think this incident constitutes proof.

[Brian Sweat]

5. First, the right wing claim that the "early" suppressed turnout

is BS. The call was made with only a few minutes left tell the polls closed in the western panhandle.

Second, the call was made based mainly on VNS exit polling. The panhandle was included in this exit polling. There was no reason to think that Bush was a lock, but they were convinced that he was, even though all of the polling showed other wise.

[FullCountNotRecount]

7. Jeb's friend's probably prepunched ballots in Dem precincts

in three corners then carefully pushed the chad back in place so that when it ran through the counter machine it would fall off and look like a duplicate vote and not count.

We had two republican workers do that here in Illinois last election in a democratic precinct. This story was not covered by the media because the media didn't want to show another way Jeb could have stolen the election.

The Tribune covered this but I don't have the link.

[nannygoat]

13. The other thing is that Al Gore's supporters had just as much

incentive to stay home if their guy was winning so I think this point is just a wash--a case could be made that both candidates were hurt by the early calling.

[mojowork_n]

6. And then, there's the other evidence

In a nutshell, 50 or 60 thousand (mostly black) voters were deliberately targeted, and taken off the voting rolls before the election, by Katherine Harris and the other, official, Republican-appointed guardians of the Florida Election Trust:

http://www.gregpalast.com/detail.cfm?artid=217&row=1

It was done under the guise of removing felons ineligible to vote from the lists of sanctioned voters. But they did an absolutely horrible job of it, so horrible, that 85 or 90 percent of those so affected were taken off the voter lists without any cause whatsoever.

Do the math, no matter how many might have voted in the panhandle, in that kind of close election....

[Brian Sweat]

10. This just supports my case.

I don't have an exact count, but if all of these people had not been disenfranchised or had their ballots spoiled (not including the usual number of spoiled ballots) or had not been at precincts that ran out of ballots or had been able to find their precincts after they were moved without telling anyone, or a number of other things the prevented mostly Democrats from voting, Gore might have one by one or maybe even two percent. This is what Zogby's polling was showing right up until election day.

[mojowork_n]

14. Ooops, My Bad, I misread your last paragraph...

Of course, it's not even debatable. I misread your discussion of Republican arguments and jumped to the wrong conclusion.

[movonne]

9. Not think - KNOW...it is not even debateable

[papau]

11. At 10:30 Gore's vote count dropped by 16000 in Florida

Now were votes thrown out? - I mean there was a recount of whatever ballots they could find.

And those votes for 3rd party folk having 80% of their statewide vote coming from the same place Gores vote dropped by 16,000 - I mean no one says that proves or even suggests anything!

:-)

[nannygoat]

12. This article has that telling quote from Al Gore

When Will Americans Realize They’ve Been Had?
http://www.buzzflash.com/farrell/03/09/16.html
(4th paragraph down)

Even before Sept. 11, the Florida fiasco was a wake-up call. If the election had not unraveled the way it did, many of us would have never comprehended the gravity of the situation. We would have thought of Clinton’s impeachment as just insane partisan politics and would most likely not have discovered how, in the wee hours of that Wednesday morning, Jeb assured George that Florida was in the bag. "Let me explain something," Al Gore reportedly said. "Your younger brother is not the ultimate authority on this." But alas, America’s preferred candidate didn't realize that Katherine Harris had hired Database Technologies to scrub 90,000 folks from Florida’s voter rolls.

[Yupster]

15. In 1988 NBC called Pennsylvania for Dukakis

late that night5 the numbers switched to Bush but the map in back of the host still had Pennsylvania colored for Dykakis.

I watched the news the next night to see what they'd say. Not a word said about it, but the map was still in back of the anchorman and Pennsylvania was now colored for Bush.

Also, in 1996, all three networks quickly called Senator Bob Smith of N Hampshire a loser in his reelection bid. They took it back about 1 am, and he won.