Corrections: In Which the New York Times Perpetuates the Myth It Created -- That Bush Won Florida in 2000

"In 2001 painstaking postmortems of the Florida count, one by The New York Times and another by a consortium of newspapers, concluded that Mr. Bush would have come out slightly ahead, even if all the votes counted throughout the state had been retallied." Alessandra Stanley, New York Times, May 23, 2008 in a review of the HBO television movie, Recount

That's not true. The New York Times did not do its own recount. It did participate in a consortium. Here's what they actually said: "If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin." Ford Fessenden And John M. Broder New York Times, November 12, 2001

Why did Ms. Stanley make such an important and fundamental error?

It is not a trivial matter. It is a common piece of misinformation. Many, many people believe it. Now a few more do, as a result of Ms. Stanley's review. It is not a trivial matter. Because that misinformation was created by one of the most bizarre, and still completely unexplained, journalistic events in modern times. Here's what happened. George Bush appeared to have won Florida, and therefore the presidency. The law in Florida was actually quite simple and direct:

ƒ(4) If the returns for any office reflect that a candidate was defeated or eliminated by one-half of a percent or less of the votes cast for such office, ... the board responsible for certifying the results of the vote on such race or measure shall order a recount of the votes cast with respect to such office or measure.

That is one of the simplest and most clearly written bits of legislation I've ever seen anywhere. The Florida court thought so too and ordered a recount. Then the United States Supreme Court stepped in and shut the recounts down. Bush was left as the victor and became the president. But, presumably, the whole world wanted to know who actually did get the most votes. It would make a great and important story. But getting the truth was too time consuming and expensive for any single news organization, so a consortium was formed. It consisted of The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. It took almost a year and cost over a million dollars. All the news organizations had the same information: Al Gore got more legal, countable votes than George Bush. Here are the headlines:

The New York Times: "STUDY OF DISPUTED FLORIDA BALLOTS FINDS JUSTICES DID NOT CAST THE DECIDING VOTE."

The Wall Street Journal: "IN ELECTION REVIEW, BUSH WINS WITHOUT SUPREME COURT HELP,"

Los Angeles Times: "BUSH STILL HAD VOTES TO WIN IN A RECOUNT, STUDY FINDS."

The Washington Post: "FLORIDA RECOUNTS WOULD HAVE FAVORED BUSH" CNN.com: "FLORIDA RECOUNT STUDY: BUSH STILL WINS."

The St. Petersburg Times: "RECOUNT: BUSH."

If you were still interested, after the headlines, and bothered to read the stories, it didn't get much better. I read it in the New York Times. Frankly, I missed the key paragraph, until I saw it pointed out in an article by Gore Vidal. I subsequently went back and read all the stories. The Times was the worst in terms of active misdirection. They spent the first three paragraphs supporting the headline and they explicitly stated that Bush would have won even with a statewide recount. Finally, in the fourth paragraph -- if you got that far -- was the statement quoted above:

"If all the ballots had been reviewed under any of seven single standards, and combined with the results of an examination of overvotes, Mr. Gore would have won, by a very narrow margin."

There it was. A very simple statement. Al Gore got more votes in Florida than George Bush. It is also very well buried. It had arcania about chads on both sides of it. Even so, as if in a panic to make sure that nobody might think that it mattered that Al Gore got more votes than George Bush, the Times dismissed what the Consortium had spent a million dollars to find out: "While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes." Even though that would seem to be a fairly obvious interpretation of the law and it is what was found when someone actually did sit down and count the votes.

The rest of the story, another four paragraphs, detailed a variety of other possible recounts, all partial recounts -- these counties, but not those counties - that the Gore lawyers or the Bush lawyers asked for at various times. Bush would have won all of those variations, he just didn't get the most votes in Florida. Not that the all variations mattered much. The Florida court had ordered a state wide hand recount.

The news story spinners hung their hat on a technicality.

Florida law, as affirmed by the courts, says a vote most be counted if there is "a clear indication of the intent of the voter."When the questions and lawsuits started, they were about undervotes. An undervote is when a voter has tried to vote but for some reason the counting machines fail to accept it. The most common cause, in Florida, which used a punch system, was that the punching device did not make a clear hole in the voting card. The piece of paper that was supposed to be knocked out, a chad, was hanging, or only broken on two corners, or merely dented. While the machines couldn't discern the "intent of the voter," the human eye often could. So we had the spectacle, and the jokes, about "hanging chads," as the recounts began. If only the undervotes were counted, by some standards of judging them, then Bush would have won.

But the consortium recount came across something else -- overvotes. An overvote is when someone punches in the name of the candidate, and then, just to make sure, writes their name on the ballot. The machines could only read that the ballots had been marked in two places and threw them out.

But a human being, who saw that the place to vote for Gore had been punched and then, that Gore's name had been written in, could easily determine the intent of the voter. So the reporters for the consortium kept track of those too, and found out that Gore actually won.

Had the people inspecting the votes in the actual recount also noticed overvotes, and would they have done something about them? The answer appears to be yes.

Newsweek has uncovered hastily scribbled faxed notes written by Terry Lewis, the plain-speaking, mystery-novel writing state judge in charge of the Florida recount, .... -- just hours before the U.S. Supreme Court issued its order -- Lewis was actively considering directing the counties to also count an even larger category of disputed ballots, the so-called "overvotes," which were rejected by the machines because they purportedly recorded more than one vote for president. ....

Judge, if you would, segregate 'overvotes' as you describe and indicate in your final report how many where you determined the clear intent of the voter," Lewis wrote in a note to Judge W. Wayne Woodard, chairman of the Charlotte County Canvassing Board on the afternoon of December 9, 2000. "I will rule on the issue for all counties, Thanks, Terry Lewis.

Newsweek, The Final Word? Michael Isikoff, 11/19/01

That leaves us with a big question. The largest, most prestigious news organizations in the United States - pretty much in the world - discovered a great and exciting story -- the wrong guy was president of the United States. Also, that the Supreme Court of the United States had interfered in an election to frustrate the actual will of the voters. (Justice Scalia wants us to get over it.) Why did they so distort the story with misleading headlines, by burying the lead, by blowing so much fog and confusion around it, that almost everybody who read or heard the story, walked away with the false impression that they had deliberately created? Created so successfully that the NY Times TV show reviewer is repeating it as fact seven years later.

There is no hard, on the record answer to that. None of the editors or publishers have come forward and said, "This is why we spun the story the way we did, even if it meant pissing away the million dollars we spent to get it." Nobody has, and nobody can, sue them for gratuitous misinformation and malfeasance, and put them in the witness box under oath to get to the bottom of it. There is only speculation. The story is dated November 12, 2001, just two months after September 11, 2001. We can imagine that they universally felt it was not the time to announce a pretender was on the throne and that the system was rotten, right to the top. But I sure would love to know how they all got on the same page about it. That would make a terrific story. Not as great as the one they threw away, but good enough.

I wrote to the Times and suggested a correction. At the time that I've submitted this, none has appeared. However, a correction has already appeared because an article about Sex and the City got the number of its television seasons was wrong. You have to know when accuracy is important.

Larry Beinhart is the author of Wag the Dog, The Librarian, and Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin. All available at nationbooks.org His new novel: SALVATION BOULEVARD will be published in September, 2008, by Nation Books Responses can be sent to [e-mail]

Comments

[thedeanpeople]

Like with Iraq, they're just covering up the fact that they failed on the origninal story -- with tragic consequences for the nation.

Everybody knew Gore won Florida. They all ran the numbers to see what would happen with a full count. A simple extrapolat­ion-by-pre­cinct of the mysteriously uncounted proved it beyond reasonable doubt**. But only the Miami Herald published the fact that Gore won Florida by TENS OF THOUSANDS of votERS. ("If The Vote Were Flawless" MH 12/03/00)

The euphemia herd of lemmings simply "went along" with imposing Stalinism over Americanism.

"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything­." -- Josef Stalin (since echoed by bush, baker, rove, harris, scalia, NY Times, et. al.)

And we have lived under that form of neo-fascism ever since.

And unless and until we impeach these election thieves and war criminals, nothing will change for the better -- on any front. (No, Hillabama cannot "save us.")

** It's beyond doubt because an extrapolation is sort of the opposite of a poll. A poll uses a small sample to indicate what a volume would be and so has a margin of error. An extrapolation uses the large volume of counted ballots to indicate what the few remaining would be -- virtually no error.

--

[mileage]

Let's be clear here. The Times stated in paragraph 1:

"A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. "

Later on, it admitted:

"But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. This also assumes that county canvassing boards would have reached the same conclusions about the disputed ballots that the consortium's independent observers did. The findings indicate that Mr. Gore might have eked out a victory if he had pursued in court a course like the one he publicly advocated when he called on the state to ''count all the votes.'' "

Beinhart quotes a paragraph out of contaxt as if it were the main conclusion of the Times investigation. It was not.

[blueskybigstar]

Thank you for going over the whole Florida debacle and laying down the truth. The fact that this government has done everything it can to control the media from Fox to the supposedly respectful institution of the New York Times shows that we have been completely infiltrated by fascism. We can't trust our traditional news sources. Many of the "experts" that come out and make points are getting their points directly from meetings in the White House. Rove successfully ruined politics in this country by the sure method of getting people to say something so many times that people actually begin to believe it.

[Cathexis]

What a travesty.

And what will be done about it?

Nothing.

Forget Zimbabwe ... we need UN Election Monitors here in the US.

[Kundera]

Democrats created the Palm Beach ballots. Blame yourselves.
Gore lost his home state. Blame yourselves.
Dems voted for Nader. Blame yourselves.
Gore ran during peace and good economic times and still lost. Blame yourselves.
Gore ran against the 2nd Amendment. Blame yourselves.

[BradF]

Gore received more votes in Florida than George W. Bush.
http://www.aei.org/docLib/20040526_KeatingPaper.pdf

Why do you hate democracy and other related American values? Yes, I blame you.

[Ankhst]

Thank you Larry:

What I find almost as curious as Big Media's rush to trivialize the 2000 election results, is the fact that the New York Times is considered to have any legitimacy left. They continue to perpetuate misdirection (if not outright falsehood) backed by their brand name alone. Should NYT still even exist? I propose instead, change the name of the entire organization (while keeping as many of the same employees/­writers/gu­est contributors as before), so that what they produce is independent of their once-good name, and judge each piece on its own merits, rather than its published origin.

It's easy to be cynical and say that to ask the average (or even the above-average) American to verify their news [even to their own varying standards] and think for themselves, is too much to ask of the populace. I respectfully (and if necessary, disrespectfully!) disagree. If we Americans continue to abdicate our own judgment and allow owned media to speak not just to us, but over us, and for us, then America as we know it is gone. Some feel this has already happened. I'm slightly more optimistic than that. First, however, we must stop accepting the unacceptable.

[23000Days]

...and the answer is, two words: David Coe.....

[BobLablah]

I've always been upset that they didn't count the "none votes". There was a huge group of people who didn't vote at all because of a variety of reasons(last minute illness, last minute car break-down, etc). If they had counted the votes of everyone who INTENDED to vote but couldn't then Gore would have won easily. They could have easily given those people another chance to vote during the court challenges and this would have been settled.

[1099]

And how would they have made more time to meet the recount deadlines if they were getting more votes in as they were counting? (including folks who would have decided that they had "intended" to vote after they saw what was transipiring). The logistics of this would have been impossible and the integrity of the election would have been cast in an even worse light if that is even possible.

[BradF]

They would have met the "recount deadline" had the U.S. Supreme Court not ordered them to stop the counting until they could make their decision..­.which was, essentially, "We stopped the counting before the deadline, so now that we did, there's no time to count the ballots before the deadline."

Does democracy -- and ensuring that every vote gets counted -- have a deadline? Why didn't such deadlines matter when the Republicans argued (succesfully) to include hundreds of military ballots for which absolutely no evidence exists that they were cast prior to the close of polls on election day?

Sorry to see so many folks claiming to be Americans here, yet arguing *against* democracy. What have you all become?

[1099]

Also pretty presumptuous to assume that everyone that the majority of people who "intended" to vote would have voted for Gore

[fairwitness]

You have to dispair for this country when evidence like this is revealed and followed to its logical conclusions. The magnitude of the fix was deep nand wide.

Our goverment is illegitimate, but the smart ones in the big media offices don't let it be known.

Why not?

[rwt1138]

I think I see your problem right here. . .

There are no "smart one" in big media offices.