Strictly as a public service, somebody needs to remind George W. Bush and
his more perfervid media drum-beaters that, according to The Associated
Press' tally, he currently trails Al Gore in the national presidential
vote by
exactly 337,576 votes.
Odds are that by the time all the absentee ballots from New York and
California are totaled, Bush will have lost the popular vote by a bit more
than
500,000. If so, Gore's ultimate popular vote margin would be greater than
that of John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon in 1960, and Nixon's over
Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
In the event that Florida court decisions continue to go Bush's way, which
is by no means as certain as TV pundits assure us, the Republican nominee
will have won the Electoral College vote by a margin of 271 votes to 267.
But for the all too convenient facts that his brother Jeb is governor of
Florida
and that the lovely Katherine Harris, co-chair of his campaign committee,
is
the secretary of state, chances are that Gore's perfectly legal and proper
appeals for hand recounts to rectify voting machine error would have taken
place with minimal controversy and he would have been awarded Florida's
25 electoral votes.
The Miami Herald commissioned a statistical study by Stephen Doig, a
professor at Arizona State University, which concluded that, had each and
every one of the 185,000 votes discarded by counting machines been
properly tallied, Gore would have won the Sunshine State by some 23,000
votes. In short, the much-derided exit polls, which correctly called 49
of 50
states on election night, but supposedly miscalled only the state in which
the
GOP candidate's brother was governor, were correct all along. Given a
perfect vote count, Gore won Florida.
While it's easy to dismiss such purely hypothetical numbers as "statistical
voodoo," as the Bush campaign promptly did, they're almost certainly more
accurate than the 537-vote Bush margin of victory certified by Harris.
The
Herald study's methods were quite conservative. First, Doig counted the
number of non-voters or double-voters in each of Florida's 5,885 precincts.
Assuming human or machine error, he assigned those votes to Gore or Bush
in precisely the same proportion the precinct as a whole voted, then added
the totals. To the obvious objection that some voters may have intended
not
to express a preference in the presidential contest, he told the Herald
that
even if the analysis were adjusted to include the remote possibility that
90
percent of voters whose ballots were discarded actually intended to skip
the
race, the margin still would make a decisive difference for Gore--about
1,400 votes.
"Doig described it as a matter of analyzing extremes," the Herald article
stated. "In his, he started with the assumption that every one of the 185,000
discarded ballots represented an intent to vote in the presidential race.
The
other extreme, he said, is the Bush contention that none of them should
count.
" 'That extreme is the reality that we have, that Gov. Bush won by a
razor-thin 500 votes,' Doig said. 'I'm no psychic. I don't know what they
really intended to do, but I do know that almost anywhere in that margin,
Gore wins. You can argue about where in the point it should be.' "
So much for Florida. Let's put it another way: Except for the defection
of
a few thousand soft-headed Naderites in the vicinity of the University
of
New Hampshire, Gore would have swept New England, earned the needed
270 electoral votes to win the presidency and the Florida sideshow wouldn't
matter. Which may be what moved our new favorite newspaper, New
Hampshire's Concord Monitor, to publish a Nov. 30 editorial entitled,
"Give it up, W."
"The time has come for Gov. George W. Bush to concede the presidential
election and go back to Texas," wrote Monitor editors. "This will be good
for him and good for the country.
"What is at stake is the integrity of the election process. Consider the
factors that are holding Bush up in Florida: voting irregularities and
errors in
county after county, intimidation of election officials by over-zealous
Bush
partisans, a secretary of state who joyfully subordinates voters' interests
to
Bush's and the prospect of a decision favorable to him in the state's
Republican-controlled legislature.
"To assume the presidency on such a foundation would give Bush no
chance whatsoever of uniting the country behind him. His handlers have
done all in their power to disenfranchise Florida voters. If partisanship,
law-bending and political spin are allowed to silence the voice of the
people,
a Bush presidency is doomed."
Here at Unsolicited Opinions Inc., we think the most telling moment of
the
2000 election came when the Bush campaign refused Gore's offer to abide
by the results of a statewide hand count in Florida. That said everything.
"His refusal," opines the Monitor, "fits a pattern of behavior since the
election that has created a stature gap for the oft-self-proclaimed president-elect.
There is something about his brief, nervous turns at the microphone that
transforms
his American flags and other power props into a Muppets set."
Alas, there's no such thing as a perfect vote count, and Bush obviously
isn't about to concede. We don't even think he should. To do so would be
a
betrayal not so much of his own ambitions as of his party, his supporters
and
the millions of misguided Americans who voted for him.
But what he ought to be doing is reflecting about how Daddy's money and
Daddy's connections appear to have done it for him once again and
restraining the absolutist rhetoric of his supporters, who have condemned
Gore as a corrupt madman and worse for pursuing every legal means to
contest an election he almost surely won.
Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National
Magazine Award. His column appears on Wednesdays.