by Eric Alterman
The Supreme Court's granting Bush the victory looks even worse today than it did 10 years ago, says Eric Alterman—even if historians weren't debating whether George W. Bush was the worst president ever or just since Grant.
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The court did not really even try to hide its partisan agenda. It insisted that its decision not be employed as precedent and released it a mere two hours before Florida’s “safe harbor” deadline of Dec. 12, thereby making it impossible for the Gore team to contest. (It would take longer than two hours just to read the decision and its many dissents.) Writing bravely in The Weekly Standard, John DiIulio Jr. warned that “the arguments that ended the battle and ‘gave’ Bush the presidency are constitutionally disingenuous at best. They will come back to haunt conservatives and confuse, if they do not cripple, the principled case for limited government, universal civic deference to legitimate, duly constituted state and local public authority.”
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All of this might have gone down more easily had the court’s decision turned out to be the correct one, based on the votes themselves. Indeed, almost every journalistic account of the decision has granted that however ugly process may have been, Bush really did deserve to win. David von Drehle, writing in this week’s Time, explains, “An independent research organization examined every last one, and whether Gore or George W. Bush won more of them was never going to be a matter of fact only interpretation. The margin of victory was more than filled with improperly, mistakenly, carelessly or ambiguously marked ballots.” This view, while powerfully representative of the journalistic consensus—“everything in America always turns out OK, somehow”—is, unfortunately, wrong.
When the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, hired by a consortium of eight newspapers to figure out the true winner, issued its final report, the headlines at the time read: “Study of Disputed Florida Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” (The New York Times) and “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush” (The Washington Post). But what the NORC researchers really discovered was the Gore legal team’s incredible incompetence.Gore’s legal advisers chose, it turned out, pretty much the only counting method available that would have lost them the election. Instead of an inclusive recount of Florida’s vote—one that would have been most fair to Florida’s voters, Gore’s top lawyer, David Boies, asked the court to count “undervotes” only. Using that method, Bush did indeed outpoll Gore, and the court’s intervention did not ultimately make a difference. It turned out to be the perfect coda to a perfectly awful campaign.
But buried beneath this colossal error, as I’ve said over and over, was
the inescapable fact that Gore was the genuine choice of a plurality of Florida’s voters as well as America’s. As the Associated Press reported in its examination of the NORC report, “In the review of all the state’s disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide.” As I pointed out in my book What Liberal Media?, he beat Bush by almost every conceivable counting standard. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you counted “hanging chads” and he won if you counted “dimpled chads.” He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot—the so-called Palm Beach standard. He even won if you counted only a fully punched chad. He won if you counted partially filled oval on an optical scan and he won if you counted only a fully filled optical scan. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter what, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote counted, then Al Gore not George W. Bush, was elected president.
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http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-12-04/bush-v-gore-decision-looks-even-more-disgraceful-10-years-later/?cid=hp:mainpromo7
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