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STATISTICAL REGRESSION
Deconstructing Bush's Phony Victory
NEW YORK -- Now, finally, the results are in. Five months after Election Night, the Miami Herald and USA Today announced the results of their painstaking recount of Florida's controversial ballots: Bush won.
Well, not in reality. It ignores some 200,000 "undervotes" -- ballots that supposedly contain no mark whatsoever -- and 110,000 "overvotes" -- those with marks for more than one candidate.
Um ... there's another problem. According to The New York Times: "In county after county, the number of ballots produced for the newspapers' examination of so-called undervotes ... failed to match the totals reported by those counties in the immediate aftermath of the election last November." Examples: 330 ballots disappeared from Orange County, 137 from Hillsborough and 67 from Pinellas. Out of 67 counties, 59 (!) "lost" votes.
Would someone please check Jeb's glove compartment?
Despite "vote slippage," the newspapers pressed forward. The media recount of about 60,000 disputed ballots applied four different counting standards:
Then they further divided each of those four counts into two more: one for the 60 counties ordered recounted by the Florida Supreme Court on Dec. 8 and another for all 67 counties in the state.
Using the most conservative standard possible -- Clean Punch for only 60 counties -- Gore won by three votes. Using the most liberal standard -- Most Inclusive for all 67 counties -- Gore won by 393 votes. Bush only wins using counting scenarios his own campaign violently opposed and sued over; for example, he wins by 1,665 votes using the Most-Inclusive standard for 60 counties. Nonetheless, the last week has seen the bizarre spectacle of Republican apologists crowing over "winning" by applying the very same standard they've been against all along.
Depending on the counting standard, the range of results falls between Gore by 393 and Bush by 1,665, meaning that a thousand-vote variance in either direction determines the outcome. But 330,000 over- and undervotes remain unconsidered, and thousands more have mysteriously disappeared. With a pool of 330 times the number of disputed votes floating around, neither Bush nor Gore can be accurately called the victor of the Florida media recount.
Not that that stopped the Bushettes. "President Bush was lawfully elected on Election Day. He won after the first statewide machine recount," announced Republican lawyer Mark Wallace in Miami. "He won after the manual recount, and he won at the conclusion of all the litigation."
Strictly speaking, of course, Bush had little use for legality while plotting his December Surprise. Rather than push for the statewide recount that would have put questions of presidential illegitimacy to rest once and for all, Bush's posse arranged for his five GOP allies on the Supreme Court to stop the recount -- a recount using a standard that, it now turns out, would have put Gore in the White House.
The cynical Bush was so desperate to "win" that he was willing to risk spending the next four to eight years being considered illegitimate if a media recount didn't prove him the victor after the fact.
Bear in mind: Even if Bush had won the recount, he would still not be the legit president of the United States. Bush was illegally installed by an outlaw Supreme Court out to subvert states' constitutional right to run elections. You don't get to call yourself legit unless you're willing to await the counting of the votes.
However, Bush's gamble came up snake eyes, which is why most Americans believe that the real president is teaching journalism at Columbia right now. Whether or not you count the Palm Beach County Buchananites, Bush lost the race. Gore lost his will to fight. And we lost our delusions of democracy.
(Ted Rall, a cartoonist and columnist for Universal Press Syndicate, is author of the cartoon collection "Search and Destroy," due out in May 2001.)
