Who would have thought that convicted Oklahoma City bomber Tim McVeigh would have a better chance of getting his case reopened than recount-denied presidential candidate Al Gore?
Consider two big news headlines from last week:
"FBI failed to deliver 3,000 pages of documentation to McVeigh lawyers."
"Florida election errors cost Gore the election."
Guess which headline created a stir that led to talk of reopening the case at hand? Here's a hint: It wasn't the one involving the question of whether the choice of the American people for president was reflected in the results of the Nov. 7, 2000, election.
That's right: The revelation that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had conveniently failed to share information with McVeigh's lawyers resulted in a one-month delay of the execution of the man convicted of killing 168 people in the Oklahoma City federal building.
What's a little disturbing is that, while the revelation regarding McVeigh may eventually lead to a new trial for the convicted bomber, the revelation regarding monumental screw-ups in Florida's presidential voting last fall will result in no shift in circumstances for Gore, or the voters whose choices were thwarted by Bush family retainers in Florida and on the bench of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Had Florida election officials adhered to a long-standing state rule requiring them to review discarded ballots with an eye to ascertaining the intent of voters, it is now quite clear that Gore would have won that state -- and with it the Electoral College votes required to make the winner of the popular vote president.
As USA Today, which has just completed a review of Florida ballots in conjunction with the Miami Herald, noted on Page 1 of its Friday editions: "Who does it appear most (Florida) voters intended to vote for? Answer: Gore."
The newspaper's front page featured an illustration that summed up the denial of democracy. It was the photo of a ballot on which a voter mistakenly placed a mark next to the name of George W. Bush. The voter crossed the mark out and then, to ensure that there was no confusion, clearly wrote "No" next to the mark and Bush's name. Finally, the voter carefully, and unequivocally, filled in the space next to Gore's name -- indicating a vote for the Democrat. This ballot, USA Today explained, was disqualified.
Though the intent of the voter to register a vote for Gore was clear, it was not counted as such. A hand recount of discarded ballots -- conducted by nonpartisan experts -- found that 1,871 could be counted without any real doubt as votes for Gore, while 1,189 registered votes for Bush.
What that means is that an honest recount of discarded ballots clearly marked for Gore or Bush would have given Gore an additional 682 votes -- more than enough to reverse the "official" Bush margin in Florida of 537.
These are just the ballots that can be established without any serious debate as votes for Gore.
Add in the tens of thousands of additional ballots that featured mistaken votes for Gore and a second candidate -- resulting from poor ballot design and instructions -- and the true sentiments of the electorate become clear. But we'll leave the explaining to Anthony Salvanto, a University of California-Irvine political science professor who specializes in computer analysis of voting patterns.
"You get a pretty clear pattern from these ballots," Salvanto says of the so-called "overvotes." "Most of these people went to the polls to vote for Gore."
Too bad those votes weren't hidden in FBI files. If that had been the case, Gore might have won a new trial in front of the Supreme Court.
Copyright 2001 The Capital Times
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