MAJOR MEDIA ARTICLES
• NEW! Miami Herald's Opinion EditorTom Fiedler says "After months of work and some $450,000 in expenses, the banner headline in last Wednesday's paper declared: Review shows ballots say Bush. And the headline was absolutely accurate, sort of." Ain't that something? He continued, "But...if the recount had been started from scratch in each of Florida's 67 counties, The Herald concluded "Gore would be in the White House today.'' Did you hear anything about that on the evening news? Read the entire Fiedler Editorial in the Miami Herald. GO!
•Rampant errors, ironies mark Florida's ballot-count crisis GO!
•BY THE NUMBERS GO!
•Recounts could have given Gore the edge GO!
•Media Blackout of the Stolen Election in the contexof Conservative Media Bias GO!
•Miami Herald Substitutes Spin for Journalism GO!
•FLORIDA ELECTION RETURNS from the Dairyland GO!
•W's Latest Unjust Reward GO!
•McAuliffe Challenges "Partial" Recount Study: "If all the ballots were counted Gore would have won Florida" GO!
•Eric Alterman ~ The truth about the Miami Herald "recount" GO!

From Bob Kunst: That the Herald has its own unique brand of the truth is nothing new. This story is for the Herald to get press for itself. This is the same paper that in December of 2000 had a story on Gore getting 23,000 votes and winning if everything is counted. However, in this story which the public won't believe either, I assure you, are so many other revelations we will get into, that should have been in the story ,but validates our demands for a federal investigation into this rigged election by Jeb and gang.

In the statement about Hamilton County with nearly 43,000 votes and early 21,000 of them not voting for President, is totally impossible and reaks with the scandal. With that kind of campaign it would have been making headlines everywhere and is double the size of those in Miami they claim were undervotes.

Of course the Herald ignores its previous articles on 3 out of 20 voting machines broken before the election in 2 black precincts in Miami or that 1700 ballots were misalligned, giving Gore over 300 new votes, and all of it dismissing that Gore already had 153 new votes after manually recounting only 15% of the 640,000+ votes and were arbitrarily stopped by the supervisor of elections, the only one appointed in the state, while the 'rent-a'mob' gang descended here to stop anymore counting.Need I remind you that Mayor Pinellas who threatened Miami with violence if the Cuban Right Wing didn't get its way on Elian Gonzalez, was with GOP leaders in Tall. and rumor is that this kind of Dem. wants to run for congress as a Gopervert, if he helped to stop the counting.

The Herald does state throughout its articles, but in timid fashion, that if those in charge, actually did the proper count, as prescribed by state law, Gore would be President.

Which brings us to the key issue of 20 out of 67 counties never recounting the first time, mandated by state law, even to do the machine count, let alone manuel counts. That's 1,800,000 Floridians who've yet to be recounted.

There are so many contradictions within the Herald story, as to implicate them for their deceit and motives, that has nothing to do with resolving anything, but adding more than ever, the need to have a federal investigation, while at the same time enraging the populace that will never put this issue to rest. If the public believes Bush is a thief, this article re-inforces it and also shows the Herald's politics, which also reaks.

Ironically, while Bush has dropped 10 points in the last few weeks in popularity and the protests against him are increasing, please see this strategy from the Herald, as one, to counter what cannot be stopped.

This is the same Herald that supported Anita Bryant and Jerry Falwell, opposed Privacy Rights in the state, opposed Janet Reno on Elian Gonzalez and ignored our 16 protests in support of her, as well as all the protests against Bush in Fla. and across the country, and Oral Majority alone has done 91 since Nov. 7,2000 and over 400 media as well.

The Herald is the voice of the 'banana republic' ,which used to be Miami and now the world sees as the U.S..

Don't fret, and don't expect anything from the Herald. They've exposed themselves and the public isn't buying it.

Those who will do anything to steal this election, will use what they want from the Herald, to keep the power and will do everything illegal to stay in power as well.

Those who know that '5 unSupreme Ct. lowlifes' appointed this thief, who thinks he now has a mandate to dismantle the Constitution and rape America and the planet in the process, will never support the Herald or any of them manipulating the news instead of reporting the truth.

In this 'coup d'etat', those evil forces, are dismantling the nation on every scale and the opposition so far has been weak from the 'so-called' leaders, while the grassroots in retaking back the country via protesting, boycotting, and highly visible statements of resistance and it is only the beginning.

The Herald's lies will fuel an even greater surgency of activism from a public frightened by all being done to 'cover up the truth'.

"Many votes could have been declared valid votes-if they had been examined in time", said the Herald.

"Had all canvassing boards in all counties examined all undervotes"-Gore wins.

Had any of these supervisors of elections obeyed the law in the first place, then Bushit wouldn't have been allowed to steal this election.

So the issue that remains on the table, and needs to be investigated is:

•Who participated in this conspiracy to invalidate our sacred right to vote?
•How did 200,000 Floridians lose their right to vote?
How did the Dem. Sen. Bill Nelson, defeat an "Impeachment" leader •Bill McCullum by 280,000 votes and then see Gore lose to Bush by so low a figure, of a few hundred, as if that many in Fla. wouldn't come out to vote for President, but only would come out to vote for Sen. More aresenic in your water anyone?
• How many millions$ went to turn away 4000 accused as 'felons' and then turn out to be 'misdemeanors' and not allowed to vote?
• How about the 2000 illegals allowed to vote?
• How about the GOP who had access to ballots in Seminole and Martin counties and against the law?
• How about Jeb spending $500,000 for 'absentee ballots' only for the GOP where the real corruption could take place?

How about Jeb and his 'committee' on voter reform is a total sham and how about the State GOP Controlled Legislature ignoring any voter reform to correct any of this? Why change what works to keep them in power, in this state or nationally?

Why did Katherine Harris accept the Broward County count, which is the standard everyone is asking for, and the Palm Beach Post used to declare Gore the winner and the Herald actually found 300 more Gore votes there with this process and still says, that by using the Gore formulae Bush wins, and by using the GOP formulae, Gore wins?

There are so many scandalous aspects to this voter fraud, and proving it actually could turn the election upside down.

Yet, in America's guts, the smell of corruption and dishonesty is so obvious in this 'Grand Theft', and those who attempt to sway the public into believing otherwise, are setting themselves up for this public contempt and believe me, the Herald has a huge start on being this mediocre rag, and has been for a very long time.

An Open Letter to the Author of the Maimi Herald Article:
It is a sad day in America, a country that was a shining example of democracy, when a major newspaper again runs a story that will be used to legitimate a President who is in office because of deceit, fraud, theft, racism, and political corruption. You and your paper are participating in this crime against America. This is not journalism. This is tyranny.

Even if your story is technically correct from a narrow point of view, your headline should have been more balanced. Your headline will be trumpeted around the world by dawn this morning totally obliterating the fact and perception that this was a flawed election. What about the bigger story of the corruption and mistakes in the system that resulted in this miscarriage of Democracy?

Your headline alone gives the thieves much solace. Why haven't you given fair coverage to the Civil Rights Commission hearings in Florida? What about Black disenfranchisement in Duval County and Tallahassee. What about flawed ballot designs in Palm Beach County? What about the purging of legal voters from the voting rolls? You know the problems go on and on, but you chose to run a story and a headline that will please the Republicans and ignore the needs of the people and democracy.

Why can't you report the very same facts in an impartial way instead of in a manner that will be spun by the Republicans as if they have a mandate. Your aren't you a fair and impartial journalist.

The best coverage of this story is coming from overseas. I regret more people can't read the UK Observer and Guardian or watch the BBC. Gregory Palast has done a fair job of covering the election. Why don't you consider running some of his articles?

Please try and right this wrong. Please help us in our efforts to get our democracy back.

Ed Rudd

Open Letter to the author of the Herald Article:
I understand this is your response to Ed Rudd's questions about your article, the Herald's most recent attempt at 'coverage' of the Florida recount: "As for the ballot review, we call them as we see them, and the results produced by our survey dictate how we see them and how we call them."

In all my life, I don't think I've read a more dismissive, self-serving and fatuous thought from someone presenting themselves as a journalist than this one. If you honestly think that this is an adequate answer to Mr. Rudd's legitimate questions as to why you chose to make such a narrow, biased interpretation of the facts, then you, sir, are an embarrassment to your profession.

God, how I wish I had a subscription to the Miami Herald, if only so I could cancel it. I do have a voice, though, and eyes to see the truth, and in time, I believe you will choke on your words.

"We won't shut up. We won't go away."

Those words have become a battle cry for some of us. You've taken your best shot at the truth, and you've chosen to bend that truth to fit a Republican bias.

But a thousand Miami Herald's can't kill it. We, the people, will keep the truth about Florida's election alive.
Sincerely, Dana Westbrook

In response to the above message:
Dana, I also had an exchange with Mr. Martin Merzer of the Miami Herald. Essentially, I wrote him to express my disbelief at his ability to mislead the American public about the real results of the election. He wrote back to me "in spite of my slightly abusive tone" (I suggested that he was either restricted or extrememly inexperienced). He insisits that there is no evidence of disenfranchisement "only personal anecdotes" and that there is no proof that Katherine Harris' actions "were illegal." My reply asked him not to confuse "a slightly abusive tone" with a total distrust of the corporate-owned media (Knight-Ridder included). I did not hear back from him again, apparently he was busy with other correspondences. The next day the Herald printed an article basically admitting that Gore would have won. I wonder how much e-mail traffic Mr. Merzer (who spent a large part of his message to me correcting my spelling of "Katharine" and "Buchanon") actually received. I suggested that the amount of time he took correcting my spelling spoke volumes about the strength of his arguments. SUMMARY: He IS a typical, biased, right-wing reporter. He has certainly found a home at the Herald.
Craig - Boca

From Vilma ;-)
Myself and others in South Florida which includes Bob Kunst and Oral Majority have been protesting the Miami Herald ever since Elian. The Miami Herald would always negatively Editorialize the Clinton Administration, specifically attacking former Attorney General Janet Reno and blatantly siding with the right-wingers.

I knew sooner or later, all of you living outside South Florida would see for yourselves just how biased and unfair the Miami Herald is in their reporting, as in the voter recount.

The Miami Herald did change their tune with today's report. click here to read

According to my sources: your emails, calls, & faxes of complaints from across the nation had a lot to do with it. And some of you really wrote some "fantastic" letters

I just wanted to "Thank You" all for helping us down here in South
Florida.

REVIEW SHOWS: BALLOTS SAY BUSH
But Gore backers have some points to argue GO!

The Miami Herald is known for it's biased and one-sided "yellow" journalistic reporting. Why do you think so many of us in South Florida have cancelled our subscriptions and have boycotted & held protests against this newspaper?

It is important that everyone send copies of their comments to all the chief Editor(s) of the Herald, also!

You MUST submit your full name, address, and a daytime phone number or the Miami Herald WILL ignore your e-mails, faxes, and letters.

Another good thing would be to also telephone your comments.

MIAMI HERALD CONTACT INFO:
Alberto Ibarguen, Publisher and Chairman: aibarguen @ herald.com
Tom Fiedler, Editorial Editor: tfiedler @ herald.com
Letters to the Editor: heraldEd @ herald.com
Martin Merzer, Reporter: mmerzer @ herald.com
TEL: 305-376-3512 FAX: 305-376-8950
The Miami Herald, One Herald Plaza, Miami, FL 33132-1693
For General Information: Tel #: 305-350-2111
Many of us down here in South Florida began voicing their comments/complaints to the Miami Herald late last night.
Vilma.

From: khafara@aol.com
HOW THE MIAMI HERALD LIED ABOUT THEIR OWN RECOUNT
The widely anticipated release of the results of the Miami Herald recount of Florida undervotes finally happened on April 3rd. The results of the recount demonstrate that under most rational scenarios, Al Gore would have won the Presidency. The results demonstrate that far more people cast a vote for Al Gore than for George W. Bush. And the results strongly suggest that Gore would have won any statewide recount done under the auspices of the Florida Supreme Court.

But the headlines from the Herald tell an entirely different story. Those headlines say that George W. Bush would have won the election.

The Herald went to enormous lengths to distort the results, misrepresent the Florida Court decision, and bury the information that demonstrated that Gore won in Florida. And an examination of the Herald's reporting during the period it was conducting the recount make it is appallingly obvious that the Herald deliberately embargoed highly relevant information favorable to Al Gore, while going to extraordinary lengths in an attempt to legitimize the Bush coup.

According to the Herald's own numbers, Al Gore won their recount by hundreds of votes. But this information was thoroughly buried in their analyses and articles, among a plethora of various and sundry numbers and scenarios. Instead, the Herald created a bizarre standards that Florida Courts had ALREADY ruled were not permissible, and created scenarios that under no circumstances are likely to have occurred under the ruling of the Florida Supreme Court. Only by doing so could the Herald announce a Bush victory.

THE HERALD STANDARDS
The Herald used four different standards in their articles.<p>

• the "loose" standard, where all dimples and marks were counted on ballots. Under this standard, Al Gore received 393 more votes than George Bush statewide.
• The "other dimples" standard, a standard by which dimples were included as votes if there were dimples elsewhere on the ballot. Under this standard, Al Gore received 299 more votes than Bush statewide. To get some idea of the bizarre bias of the Herald, consider this. The Herald called this "the Palm Beach Standard". But under this standard, Gore would have picked up hundreds of more votes in Palm Beach County than he actually did. The misrepresentation of the "other dimple" standard as the "Palm Beach standard" is a key element in the Herald's distortion of the facts.
• The "two corner" standard, a standard by which only ballots with chads with at least two corners detached are counted as votes. Under this standard, George Bush would have won by 352 votes statewide. There is just one rather critical problem with this standard. The Florida courts had ALREADY ruled that such a standard was completely arbitrary, and could not be used by canvassing boards when counting votes by hand. The inclusion of this standard, and the prominent role it was given by the Herald, is an indication of the Herald's significant bias.
• The "clear punch" standard, or the votes which should have been counted by machine, but were never counted. Under this standard, Al Gore won statewide by three votes. As with the three corner standard, however, this standard could not be used in manually counting votes.

THE HERALD SCENARIOS-STATEWIDE STANDARDS
The Herald went out of its way to create a statewide scenario in which Bush would be shown to win in Florida, and to denigrate one of the standards by which Al Gore would have won in Florida. As noted above, the two-corner standard had previously been ruled illegal as a method of hand counting ballots by at least two Florida State Courts, and these rulings were never overturned. Nevertheless, this standard was one of the ones chosen by the Herald as a "statewide" standard, and treated as if it were possible for it to have become the statewide standard.

At the same time the Herald was ignoring the court decisions for the "two corner standard" it was agressively denigrating, based on their presumptions on how the court would rule, another scenario under which Gore would win-a statewide "clear punch" standard. What is significant about the Herald's treatment of this scenario is that the Herald created an entirely separate category for it. The Herald's justification for this was that the court was unlikely to impose a different standard on Dade County when it counted the undervoted ballots under the Supreme Court order than was used during the abortive manual recount done under the statutory provisions.

Although the Herald is quite correct in this assumption, it never bothers to raise the question of the imposition of the 'clear punch' standard on those counties which had not created a standard during the manual recount process. Under such a scenario, Gore would have again emerged victorious.

But what is perhaps most indicative of the bias of the Herald is that in its discussion of the 'clear punch' scenario, virtually no mention is made of the fact that these were votes that SHOULD HAVE BEEN COUNTED BY MACHINE, and were not. Indeed, the Herald takes a mocking tone toward this scenario, describing as "ironic" that Gore would have won if this standard had been used statewide.

In point of fact, because of the number of unaccounted for undervotes (ballots that the certified counts indicated were undervotes, but were not found when the undervotes were separated) renders any evaluation of these clear punched ballots rather irrelevant. One has to assume that the reason these "clear punch" ballots were included in the undervote count is that, at some point, either these ballots had "hanging chad" or more significantly, a "floating chad", a detached chad from another ballot that had blocked the presidential hole during the sorting process.

Almost no mention is ever made by the Herald of the fact that these ballots (over 2000 of them) give the lie to the Bush strategy that there was no "machine error", and thus no reason to count votes by hand at all. The "floating chad" problem is inherent in any machine count of ballots, and is caused solely by the tabulating equipment.

The Gore legal team, however, must be faulted here as well, for failing to emphasize the existence of the "floating chad" problem as a justification for the manual recounts. Harris and Bush were able to use the "no machine error" excuse to delay the manual recounts for weeks.

THE HERALD STANDARDS-"THE PALM BEACH STANDARD" LIE
Part of the key to understanding the Herald's "Big Lie" in presenting Bush as the winner under Florida Supreme Court order is its complete misrepresentation of the "Palm Beach Standard". What the Herald refers to as the "Palm Beach Standard" is actually an "other dimple" standard-if there is a dimple in another race, its counted as a vote. That is NOT the standard that was used in Palm Beach County.

The actual Palm Beach Standard was not the presence of another dimple, but a pattern of dimples throughout the ballot in the other races.

Under the "other dimple" standard, Al Gore would have received a net gain in Palm Beach County of 414 votes. In other words, Gore's net gain of 174 votes represented only 42% of the votes that the Herald says can be counted using the "Palm Beach Standard". The Bush "win" under the "Palm Beach standard" and its assumptions regarding the Florida Supreme Court decision appears to be based solely on the inclusion of votes that would never have been included by the Palm Beach Canvassing Board.

It is essential to note that Herald's phony "Palm Beach standard" is the "middle" standard. Its not the one that includes all the votes/dimples, and is not the "strict" two-corner chad standard. It represents the "compromise" standard, and as such is presumed to be the most reasonable. The fact that the "strict" standard is completely illegal is, of course, disregarded.

To put it bluntly, the Herald is LYING about its own study. Its own data demonstrates conclusively that calling the "other dimple" standard the "Palm Beach Standard" cannot be justified under ANY circumstances, because under the real Palm Beach standard, fewer than half the votes found using the Herald's "Palm Beach Standard" were counted.

But without this BIG LIE, the Herald would not have been able to justify its desired (and bizarrely presumptuous, on other grounds) conclusions-that Bush would have won had the recount been finished under the order of the Florida Supreme Court.

On the subject of nomenclature, it should be noted that, although the Herald now acknowledges that dimples are legal votes, it buries that acknowledgement deep in its lead article, and only fully explains why dimples are votes in a separate, and decidedly non-prominent article. This acknowledgment comes about because somebody at the Herald finally read the Beckstrom decision of the Florida Supreme Court from 1998. But itstead of labelling the "dimples are votes" standard as "legal votes" or "Beckstrom votes", this standard is labelled "loose", with all the negative connotations that word has.

THE HERALD STANDARDS-REAL STANDARDS NOT MENTIONED
One of the most egregious omissions of the entire Herald study is its complete failure to recognize the fact that there already exist standards for hand-counting votes in a Presidential election. These are standards that have the full furce of law and precedent behind them.

Both Broward County, and Volusia County conducted full manual recounts. These votes were certified by the state, and were completely and absolutely uncontested by either Gore or Bush. They represent a clear, and de facto, minimal standard by which any statewide recount of votes would have to be conducted if a consistent standard is used.

It should be noted that the Volusia standard is, in fact, the "dimple" standard. If any statewide standard were to be approved, it would have to include those votes that had been certified by the state, and were uncontested. Volusia County counted incompletely filled out holes on its optically scanned ballots as votes. The equivalent of such an incomplete mark for a punch card ballot would include a dimple.

However, it is possible that separate standards would be used for different voting methods, in which case the Broward standard would have to be the minimum standard by which legal votes were counted for punch card ballots. The Broward standard included dimples when the dimple occurred on a ballot when there was a clear preference in other races for the party of the presidential candidate whose chad was dimpled. (In other words, if dimpled the Gore chad, then punched out the chads for a bunch of other Democratic candidates, that would be a vote for Gore. If you dimpled the Gore chad, then voted for mostly Republican candidates in other races, that dimple would be ignored.)

Both standards, of course would have worked to Gore's advantage. The Volusia County standard would have required that the undervotes from Palm Beach, Broward, and Dade be re-examined (see below), and Gore would have won the dimple count, according to the Herald's numbers. The Broward standard would have also required re-examining the Palm Beach ballots gaining Gore a considerable number of votes. More importantly, perhaps, is that by using the Broward standard, Gore would do much better than Bush based on the totals from the Senate race. The Democratic Senate candidate received about 23,000 fewer votes than Gore; the Republican candidate for Senate got over 200,000 fewer votes than Bush. Additionally, because of the higher undervote rate in African American communities, and the strong tendency of African Americans to vote straight Democratic tickets, Gore's advantage under the Broward standard would have been significant indeed.

The Herald also completely ignored its own reporting that, in Dade County alone, over 1700 hundred ballots were cast but not counted because of holes punched in the chads directly below the chad for the presidential candidates. These chads should have been impossible to create unless the ballot had been misaligned in the equipment used for voting. No review of undervoted ballots can be complete without mentioning these ballots, and the fact that they indicate that Gore would have received an additional 314 votes had the equipment been easier to use. Because of the way in which the Duval County ballot was laid out, it is also highly likely that a considerable number of undervoted ballots there had the same problem, but no mention of them was made.

Finally, the Herald makes no mention of the fact that legally prescribed votes were never counted in Florida. Although these LEGAL votes were part of the "overvoted" ballots, the fact that they are specifically prescribed under Florida law demands their inclusion in any canvass of ballots under any circumstances. According to the Orlando Sentinel, Gore received a net gain of at least 194 fully prescribed legal votes from nine optically scanned counties that violated the law in the way in which they counted their votes-and Bush won each of these counties. There are undoubtably more of these legal votes in other counties, but until the "media consortium" releases its examination of the overvoted ballots, we will not know how many.

THE HERALD SCENARIOS-MISREPRESENTING THE COURTS
The Herald's projections of Bush victories under the "recount done under the Florida Supreme Court order" scenarios is based on a number of completely false premises
1. That the Palm Beach Standard is actually the standard used in Palm Beach County. As noted above, this is demonstrably false
2. That a it would be possible for counties to use the "two corner" standard. As noted above, the Florida Courts already ruled such a standard illegal.
3. That a dimple standard would be used statewide, but that it would be applied ONLY to those counties that were being counted under the original court order. This is patently absurd.

The decision of the Supreme Court not to re-examine the Palm Beach ballots was not based on a ruling that the PBC canvassing board had included all the legal votes. The ruling was based solely on the fact that the standard used by PBC did not represent an ABUSE of the powers vested in it by the statutes. Any imposition of a statewide standard would have to be done, by definition, statewide. Inasmuch as it could be easily demonstrated in court that dimpled ballots were NOT counted in both Palm Beach and Broward Counties, there is little question that the disputed ballots from these counties would have been re-examined under an imposed "dimple standard". Indeed, any imposition of ANY statewide standard would require the re-examination of undervotes from Palm Beach County and Browa! rd County (except if the Broward standard were imposed).

In other words, none of the Bush "Supreme Court" based victories hold up to any sort of scrutiny whatsoever. They are based on completely false definitions, the disregarding of previous court decisions, and an apparently willful misinterpretation of the grounds on which the Palm Beach ballots had been excluded from the statewide recount. The Herald engaged in nothing but pure, completely baseless, and utterly dishonest spin.<p>
There is a final assumption in the "Supreme Court" scenarios, however, that is so outrageous, and which was so determinative of the spin the Herald used, that calling it a "lie" is putting it mildly. That assumption is this:

That there would be consistent counting of votes across county lines without the imposition of statewide standards.

The Herald created three scenarios under the "Florida Supreme Court" order that are virtually impossible , and used them to declare George W. Bush the winner. Only by positing these impossible scenarios could the Herald declare Bush the winner. And the political realities at the time that the Court order came down make it highly unlikely, if not impossible, that Bush would have won under any realistic scenario that included differing standards between counties

Throughout the entire process, the Bush team had been arguing against the inclusion of any dimpled ballots. Without those dimpled ballots, given the 300+ vote advantage that Gore would have received from the optically scanned counties, Gore's actual three vote lead in the "clear vote" category, the at least 194 legal votes that were never included in the certified totals, and the 344 votes awarded to Gore by the Florida Court from Dade and Palm Beach Counties, it becomes virtually impossible to come up with the necessary votes for Bush to have won the recounts.

Bush did best in the dimple counts in those counties that were controlled by the GOP; places like Duval County, Collier County, and Marion County. Those counties would likely have used the most restrictive counting methods allowable under the law, while those counties controlled by pro-Gore Democrats would have used a more liberal standard. The net result would have been that Bush would probably not have received the most votes.

However, there is no way to know exactly how that kind of count would have turned out. Bush might have won. But had Bush switched course, and started to demand the use of any standard more liberal than the real Palm Beach Standard, not only would it have been politically disasterous, it would have created the conditions under which Gore could have sucessfully demanded a re-examination of the Palm Beach County ballots.

The important point however, is that it is impossible to predict with any certainty, given the results of the Herald undervote examination, what would have happened under the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court. "Uncertainty" is the only legitimate conclusion that can be drawn from the data. And despite the fact that the only real conclusion to be drawn was that the data was inconclusive, the Herald created bogus and ridiculous scenarios in order to declare Bush the winner.

WHY THE LIE?
By itself, the data from the Herald manages to prove absolutely nothing. But taken in conjuction with the media recounts that have been done of the overvoted ballots, the Herald data does prove one thing decisively---more people VOTED for Al Gore than for George W. Bush in Florida.

Then why did the Herald declare Bush the winner? Although there is more than sufficient evidence to say that the Herald did so because of its clear, consistent and unmistakable political bias, the real reason is probably money. The Herald went to considerable expense to do this recount, and the only way it is every going to get a return on this investment is by selling the book it is doing on the recounts. The best way to do that is to create controversy about the results. Controversy sells books.

The Herald recount represents a distinct low point in journalistic integrity and credibility. After promising a completed recount in three week, it took three months. After declaring, without equivocation, that it would not release any partial results, the Herald released the results from one Dade County, and then completely misrepresented what those results actually meant. And now they give us the Big Lie.

It should not go unnoticed that during the post-November 7th period, the Herald has completely avoided looking into the wholesale irregularities perpetrated by Republican election officials in Florida.

Instead of investigating the flons's list scandal, the Herald investigated people who voted, and consistently highlighted the number of felons it supposedly found who voted. The Herald never bothered to emphasize in those articles that the reason most of those felons were able to vote is that the Republican controlled Division of Elections was supposed to provide the counties with an accurate list of ineligible voters who were registered to vote. Rather than disenfranchise voters who were eligible to vote, many county supervisors recognized that, under the laws of Florida, they had no right to remove someone from the rolls based on information that could not be depended upon. The emphasis of the Herald was not the deliberate attempt to disenfranchise voters, but on the fact that people actually voted.

Instead of investigating the circumstances under which election documents were altered by Republican Party operatives with the blessing of Republican elected officials, the Herald went in search of dead people voting…found one in Palm Beach County, and did an entire story around that one dead voter.

And despite numerous articles about illegal votes being cast, not once did the Herald mention the tens of thousands of fraudulently cast absentee ballots that provided George W. Bush with his margin of victory. These votes were cast after the Republican Party urged voters to cast absentee ballots fraudulently, in a solicitation that was designed to look like voting for convenience was an act endorsed by the Governor, acting as the Governor.

Nor should it go unnoticed that the Herald withheld the information regarding the legal status of undervoted ballots (per the Beckstrom decision) until it could bury as part of its undervote coverage. And the Herald has yet to mention the even more relevant part of the Beckstrom decision---the part that says that election officials MUST do their jobs the way the laws of Florida says they have to do them, and that they do NOT have the discretion to ignore the laws of Florida as they see fit. Such an admission would require the Herald to do what it clearly has no interest in doing---looking at how the failure of state and local Republican officials to obey the law was responsible for the election being stolen.
As noted above, one cannot simply say that the reason the Herald lied about the results of its examination of the overvotes was political. But given the nature of its coverage of the Florida election when taken as a whole, no reasonable person could be questioned about assuming that is precisely what happened.

From: onevoiceonevote
It is quite obvious that more people did vote (or thought they did) for Gore in Florida. The exit polls and other discoveries confirm this.

The votes weren't counted for various reasons ranging from incompetence of Jeb-the-buck-stops-here Bush, Katherine Harris and other election officials to blocking the hand recounts.

A whole miriad of issues, anomolies and perhaps even fraud came together to deny Gore the rightful presidency he was elected to.

But perhaps the most egregious thing of all was Jeb Bush publically recusing himself and going underground enlisting his lawyers and other political operatives to block the vote recounting.

The fact that W was a coward and did not stand for the recount when it legally would have mattered puts him in the same category as 3rd world dictators who do anything they can to gain power.

That he didn't "trust the people" and their vote and ability to fairly recount it speaks volumes about what kind of person he is.

On the one hand he spouted all this states' rights and "trust the people" rhetoric during his campaign and on the other, when it comes to actually practicing what he preached, he did just the opposite!

So, he and his supporters can count all the partial recounts, "divined votes", "manufactured" votes (that they didn't trust then) now and hypocritically say those same type votes somehow validate him today, but it won't work!

He gave up his chance for legitimacy back in November and no manner of claiming today what he denied back then will legitimize him now!

Kunst Archives GO!

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