David, I think there are a lot of people who care about the truth, and about getting it right - not a plurality by any means, but still a bigger group than, say, the Nader vote. But, let’s face it, it doesn’t make a very rousing poster to wave. And people who feel strongly enough about a cause to get out there in public, these days, are going to do so because they feel strongly about one side or the other, not in support of an abstraction.
An election is supposed to reflect the will of the people, and in particular, those people who cared enough to show up at a polling place and vote. It’s not supposed to be a vision or IQ test; it’s not supposed to be a test of whether aging hands can adequately punch a hole in a piece of paper. In each state, at least, it’s supposed to tell us which of the candidates involved was favored by the most people. (And in the Presidential election, of course, it’s supposed to take the electoral votes of each state, and add them up to see who’s got the most of those. But within each state, the idea is to measure who had more supporters show up at the polls Tuesday before last.)
In Florida, it’s becoming increasingly hard to argue that more Bush supporters tried to vote than Gore supporters. All that can be said is that Bush voters, for a number of reasons, were more successful at having their votes correctly recorded. The two main known foul-ups in the Florida tally were the problems with the punched ballots, and the poorly lined up Palm Beach ‘butterfly ballot’. Both problems clearly caused intended votes to not be counted, or to be incorrectly counted. The effect of both kinds of undercount, if you will, fell disproportionately on Gore voters. The punched ballots were apparently used much more heavily in Democratic areas than in Republican areas, primarily due to cost considerations; as a result, the votes lost to ‘hanging chads’ and the like were primarily Democratic. And the sample we have of the double-punched ballots in Palm Beach County has backed my thesis of bias due to the off-shift of the paper relative to the holes on the ballot’s spine: as I sum up here, the odds that Gore didn’t lose a net of over 5000 votes to unintentional double-voting appear to be well over a million to one, and a better guesstimate would be in the 12-13,000 range.
If there’s a source of biased results in this election - in Florida or anywhere else - to compensate, we don’t know about it. As Florida’s votes endure increasing scrutiny, it becomes more unlikely that such a source exists there. One source that has been mentioned is the projection of Florida for Gore by the networks before the polls closed in the CST portion of the FL panhandle, up near Pensacola. But considering that that projection occured only scant minutes ahead of the closing of polls there, and considering that the total vote in that largely Republican part of the state totalled only 375,000 votes for the day, one has to question how many total votes they could have lost in the last 10-15 minutes. Most people who heard the news who might have voted would have had to be already in their cars, driving to the polls just before closing time; maybe some of them turned around and drove home, but that’s ‘some’ out of a pretty small number to begin with. After that, claims of undercounted Bush voters in FL are few and far between. (Duval County’s disqualified ballots are apparently largely from heavily Democratic precincts, incidentally.)
And elsewhere - well, if there’s a problem, let them raise it. There would have to be a couple of them, because if FL is Gore’s, that would give him 287 or 292 EC votes, depending on NM (OR went for Gore early today). But at this point, I have to believe that the will of the FL voters on Election Day was to support Gore, by probably a margin of well over 10,000 votes.
Morally, I believe the proper course of action for George W. Bush would be to acknowledge the will of the voters in Florida, and concede the election. This would never happen in any number of alternate universes, of course. But the closer I look at how Florida’s Election Day went, the more unavoidable that conclusion seems to me. There were thousands of Gore votes out there that, due to the aforementioned factors, didn’t get counted as such, and there just aren’t enough possible uncounted Bush votes to come close to balancing that out. I could be wrong, but that’s how I see it.