Maybe if Gore initially demands a statewide hand recount of all undervotes and overvotes in all of Florida immediately and somehow actually gets this request of his granted.
Also, if there would have been no butterfly ballot and no butterfly effect from this afterwards, then Gore would have almost certainly indisputably won Florida.
Yes, because candidates who are leading in the vote counting should concede defeat. :rolleyes: Indeed, what’s next–having Bush, Gore, Lieberman, and Cheney have a four-way inside of the White House while Bill and Hillary Clinton watch? 
Yes–after all, in addition to that 1976 DUI of mine, I also have some child porn stashed in my basement. Anyway, say hello to President-elect Dick Cheney, a.k.a. Darth Vader!
I certainly agree with all of this! 
Also, though, Al Gore could have picked Bob Graham instead of Joe Lieberman as his VP pick.
The former North Carolina governor would have been perfect for Gore at the time. A fellow Southerner, moderate, and focused on education. Gore may have won Arkansas and Tennessee, and he may not have needed Florida.
If you care about democracy and one person one vote it should be that anyone who had a majority after a careful recount wins.
How are two counts less arbitrary than one? There is no evidence that a 2nd count is more accurate than a 1st count.
Now if you did 10 counts, and gave the election to the winner of the most counts, that would have a better chance of being accurate. The whole idea of recounts has never been very sound.
Like my grade-school teachers all used to say: “You will do it again until you get it right.”
Seriously, if it had been any pivotal state other than one where one candidate’s brother was governor and a recount had been conducted using uniform standards across that state, the losing side would have accepted it as an honest result providing that losing candidate was Al Gore.
What prevents the loser from saying, “That recount wasn’t good enough. I demand another one?”
I recall at the time getting sick of Republicans saying that Gore supporters should grow up and accept that they lost. It seemed to me that it would be a perfectly acceptable attitude if Republicans would accept that they had in fact stolen the election. So then both parties could get on with dealing with what was now (well then) history.
Kind of like Armando Galarraga’s near perfect game. In retrospect everyone knows what the right decision should have been. Or not. But it doesn’t matter now.
Bush didn’t win legit, but he didn’t “steal” the election. Palm Beach County’s incompetence in designing their ballots did. Along with Nader’s stupidity and Bill Clinton’s mental illness.
Give it to Nader, then you’d have two sides crying foul.
The voter purge did. The absentee ballot shenanigans did. But ultimately what did was the refusal of Republican operatives, including those on the Supreme Court, to allow a full recount. As rjung pointed out a decade ago, according the media consortium recount scenarios, Gore won Florida.
And how many times did they count? Why was the 1st count less accurate than the 2nd? If you count a jar of marbles once, and then do it a second time and get a different result, how do you know your second count was more accurate?
Depends on how you count. Which depends on who is doing the counting. The officials responsible had a duty to determine the will of the electorate. Unfortunately far too many were Republican hacks who instead did everything possible to ensure the election of their man culminating in the Supreme Court ordering Florida to stop counting votes to determine if George Bush would be the next president because it would undermine the presidency of George Bush.
Considering that the margin of victory in Florida was 0.009%, you have a curious definition of “rigged.”
It is possible for a rigged game to be close. It is even possible to win a game despite it being rigged against you. It’s just not something you should count on.
And regardless of whether the rigging decided the election, there were certainly some conflicts of interest there that should not have been allowed, like the state official responsible for running the election being a campaign manager for one of the candidates.
Came in to say this.
And Chronos said the other thing I was thinking of, the result could have been a clear victory, though with the variety of irregularities in Florida that seems unlikely.
Generally, a recount is done with a much higher-reliability process, with more independent verification (I don’t actually know what Florida’s procedures are, so this may be not be true there)
Example, if the normal process to count votes is to run them through a machine and accept the margin of error of the machine, the recount process is to have each batch hand-counted by different people and make sure that both people get the same result. If they don’t get the same result, they go back and count again until they do.
Of course, there’s always arguments about how improperly filled-out ballots should be counted. But those aren’t issues that can be solved with a counting procedure.
A full hand recount was done immediately after the machine recount. So Gore wanted a third recount.
Edit: oh wait, my bad, 2nd count was also a machine recount.