THE HEADLINES on the recount story are, per usual, wrong. A careful reading of the data compiled by the Herald and its parent company Knight-Ridder (in a partnership with USA Today) reveals that the newspaper answered only one question conclusively: “What would have happened if the Supreme Court had not intervened to end the counting?” The answer to that question, as best as the Herald and its accounting firm, BDO Seidman, LLP, could determine, is that Bush’s initial margin of 537 votes would have increased to 1,665 votes, had the counters employed the charitable chad-counting standard desired by the Gore camp.
 
BOTH SIDES ERRED
       This piece of news leads us to two immediate conclusions. First, the conservative Republican majority on the Supreme Court sullied the good name of that institution prematurely and unnecessarily. Second, Team Gore’s inept response to the post-election debacle also greased the skids for Bush’s backdoor entry to the White House.

Bush hero Justice Antonin Scalia should have kept his partisan comments to himself when he explained that the count needed to be shut down to insure public ignorance of the genuine result. His exact words were — “Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards. That is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires.” The court’s dishonorable participation in cutting short a ballot count for reasons it could not even coherently explain and hence, refused to allow to serve as a legal precedent, proved entirely superfluous.
 
A TRUE TRAVESTY
The reason the court needn’t have bothered is almost entirely due to the incompetence — and considerable bad political faith — of the Gore camp. Its protestations to the contrary, the Gore team was never interested in a full and fair count of all of the Florida votes. It wanted only the votes recounted that it believed were most likely to yield more Gore votes. Stupidly, it ignored those Republican counties where most of the irregularities existed and it ignored the potential treasure trove of “overvotes,” in which confused voters accidentally marked their ballots for both a presidential and a vice-presidential candidate, or both marked a candidate on the main ballot and then wrote his name in a second time to make certain that everybody understood their choice. In a true travesty of the spirit of democratic equality, these over-enthusiastic voters had their votes disqualified in exactly the same fashion as those who marked the two candidates because nobody could be bothered to count them.
       Beyond these rather narrow conclusions, however, the Herald recount serves only to generate more confusion. It calculates that using the strictest possible vote count standard — the one, you will recall, advocated by all those tough-minded Republicans taking their talking points from Jim Baker-Gore would have actually won by a landslide of exactly three votes or 0.00005 percent of the nearly 6 million votes counted.

WHO’S COUNTING?
Of course, almost all of these numbers are statistically meaningless, since the built-in margin of error exceeds the margin of victory. What was important in Florida, ultimately, was not who voted for whom but who was doing the counting. The Herald’s review discovered that canvassing boards in the key counties of Broward and Palm Beach counties discarded hundreds of ballots that bore marks no different from those on scores of ballots that were accepted as valid presidential votes. “Had those ballots instead been counted as valid votes,” the report concludes, “allowing dimples, pinpricks and hanging chads, Gore would be in the White House today.”
       Now take a look at the count in light of Florida law. The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998 that canvassing boards must examine “damaged or defective” ballots for voter intent and further defined the term “defective ballot” as “a ballot which is marked in a manner such that it cannot be read by a scanner.”
       According to the Herald, “though some canvassing boards in optical-scan counties conducted such reviews on Election Night, most boards around the state did not.” Had they done so, thousands of votes would have been salvaged long before the election dispute landed in court.
       Under those circumstances — the ones, recall, that the law mandates — Gore would have won Florida and the White House by 393 votes. If the only dimples that counted were the ones where other races were also dimpled, then President Gore’s margin shrinks to a mere 299 votes. (Gore’s lawyers never even bothered to make this argument, so incompetent and narrowly focused were their efforts.)
       Any number of fair counts, counts mandated by Florida law, and/or counting methods mandated by common sense would also have put Gore ahead of Bush. Not even Jim Baker ever tried to argue that it was not the “intent” of Florida voters to chose Gore by probably many tens of thousands of votes. The “butterfly ballot,” the confusion sewn by incompetent and nefarious local election boards, all conspired to make certain that these votes would be disqualified, by hook or by proverbial crook.
       But the fact is, almost any counting method that would have yielded a Gore victory would never have landed Al Gore in the White House; not with Jeb Bush and Katherine Harris controlling the state’s political machinery; with the Republican legislature willing to intervene if that failed; with the Republican Congress ready to intervene if that somehow failed; and (we now know) the Republican U.S. Supreme Court willing to intervene in just about any circumstances imaginable.
       Wednesday’s Herald story is only the beginning, of course. The Herald and its corporate parent, Knight-Ridder, several other Florida newspapers and USA Today also are conducting a full review of at least 110,000 overvotes and promise a conclusion within about a month. More significantly, a group of national news organizations and Florida newspapers is conducting a broader recount under the auspices of the University of Chicago, and this effort should dwarf the Herald’s incomplete “undervote only” effort that so far, has served to obscure as much as it has illuminated. Only then will we know just how far the current resident of the White House had to go to ensure his victory in an election in which, by all fair measures of democratic intent, he was the clear loser.