At the beginning of Fahrenheit 9/11, Moore shows a clip of Jeffery Toobin saying something like “So in **every ** recount scenario, Gore ends up with the most votes (in Florida)”.
This has always been a source of great confusion for me. For every claim that Gore would have won the recount there is a counter claim that, no, that’s only because condition X, qualifier Y and caveat Z weren’t considered. Same thing for claims that Bush would have won the recount.
Let’s settle this once and for all Straight Dope style.
Does Toobin’s statement pass the truth test?
Under what conditions would Bush have won the recount? Under what conditions would Gore have won?
How **should ** the disputed election have been decided? Complete recount of all of Florida; partial recount by selected precincts; Supreme Court decision; other?
As I understand it, a complete county-by-county recount of Florida would have yielded a Gore victory.
However, Gore never requested a statewide recount; he only requested a recount in certain counties. A recount of those counties only would not have changed the outcome.
(That’s from memory, so I invite anyone with cites to the contrary to come along and correct me.)
Bush would have won if they counted more of his votes than Gore’s. Gore vice versa
Why are people still concerned with how the votes were counted? The scandal in Florida was to do with who was allowed to vote and who was prevented (and there are plenty of threads already on that).
IIRC, Gore was allowed under Florida Election Law to request a complete recount of the entire state. He opted not to do so, however, to avoid prolonging the process.
Because that’s what Toobin’s statement was based on. This thread is mainly about verifying Moore’s facts, even when they are spoken through another party.
Beyond that, Question 3 is still relevant to you. Given the fact that the polls were closed and voting was over when questions arose about the vote in Florida, what should have happened? Do you think that those who were not allowed to vote should have had another chance?
Quickie summary. Look past the headline and read the text. Toobin isn’t completely right; Gore would have won under most, not all, counting standards. However, it was clear from Judge Terry Lewis’ comments that he probably *would * have ordered inclusion of “overvotes” (ballots where a candidate’s name was written in as well as checked off, but were rejected anyway) in a statewide hand recount, and that *would * have made Gore the winner, the disenfranchised blacks and the Jews for Buchanan and the postmarked-after-Election-Day overseas ballots notwithstanding.
Surely you heard of the NORC effort media consortium that did exactly that? It was reported widely, including in the link above and in the one you yourself just gave. If your concern is credibility, that cuts both ways.
bnorton, to your last question, how should it have been resolved? In a way that most faithfully followed the Constitutional principle of equal protection, where every citizen had an equal opportunity to vote and have that vote be counted. The rest follows.
I believe that the accepted resolution in cases where the voters intentions have been frustrated in a democracy by undemocratic means are for the people to take to the streets, set fire to a lot of things and make sure that the illegitimate government is soon fleeing the country in search of a friendly haven, somewhere in Africa maybe.
Without answering the OP in re: to F911 factual accuracy, it is my understanding that had the whole scandal with the voter scrub lists denying many (majorly black) voters from ever casting a ballot, the numbers would never have been close enough for Bush to have had a chance.
As to what should have happened, the results were within the margin of error, so a complete recount should have been mandatory to establish the true winner.
AFAICR that was the beauty* of the Supreme Court decision: Florida had the right to do a recount, but whoops….
They also put a deadline for a few hours or a day(!) making finishing the recount impossible. Making it a decision that only could benefit Bush, It was so shameful a decision that even the Supremes left the building in secret.
BTW the dissents of the court were so powerful that it would have been logical to see at least close to half of the mainstream media be critical of his “fraudulency”, as the media in the day, treated the one term president Hayes. The fact that even today it is hard to find explicit criticism of this act, in the mainstream media, was the item that convinced me that calling it the “liberal media” was a sick joke.
[sub]*That is, beauty in the eyes of the republicans.[/sub]
Not that it has to do with anything, but does everyone still pretty much agree that more voters in Florida left on that day intending to vote for Gore than for Bush? That seems to be the case as far as I can tell. Again, that doesn’t mean anything, because our system can’t work on intentions, just predictable rules for carrying them out properly. But do even Bush supporters at least concede the former point, even if it is irrelevant? And would they agree, if so, that it’s too bad and shows the need for serious election reform that, unfortunately, still seems not to have occured in any serious fashion?
I think a better statment would be that the number of people intending to vote for either candidate was so close that the ballot counting methods in use were incapable of resolving the difference.
It’s been a few days since I’ve seen the movie but I’m almost certain that you’re paraphrase is incorrect. It was more like (paraphrasing from memory) “In every scenario that includes a recount of the whole state Gore ends up with the most votes.”
Can anyone back me up on this or does anyone remember hearing it the way bnorton says? The answer to the OP’s question 1 depends on exactly what Toobin said. Is there a transcript on the web somewhere?
A ballot with the candidates name checked off on the ballot corresponding with a write-in of that same candidate written by that same voter was ultimately NOT included as a vote for that candidate?
This thread is supposed to be a “Farenheit 9/11 fact check” – and I’ve seen the movie, and based on that, and what I remember of the events of 2000, and what’s been posted above in this thread, Moore got all the facts right. There might have been a lot of things he left out (necessarily – including all the relevant facts of the story would require a full-length documentary about the 2000 election alone), but there was nothing he misrepresented or distorted. So if you want to find factual errors in F9/11, you’ll have to find them elsewhere in the film. If you can.
OK. So a summary of the CNN quickie summary link furnished by ElvisL1ves is this. The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) looked at four different scenarios in which a recount might have occured (see below). Three (#1, 3 & 4) were based on the statewide standard that duality72points out was the standard Toobin used in his statement. In two of those scenarios Gore would have won, but in one Bush would have won.
Here is Toobin’s exact quote: “If there was a statewide recount, under every scenario, Gore won the election.” My reading of this is that scenario #1 qualifies as a “statewide recount” in which Bush wins, which makes Toobin’s claim untrue.
Now you can argue that scenario #1 is not a very good way to do a recount, but that is outside the scope of the claim. From a purely factual point of view it seems to me that Toobin and, by extension, Moore are incorrect in that claim.
