Speaking of the 2000s, a decade so terrible there isn't even a useful abbreviation for it, one thing that the Bernie folks remind me of right now is the intense conviction, which I still see in my peer group, that Bush must have stolen the elections in 2000 and 2004 with Diebold's voting machines.
I find it a little embarrassing how many otherwise pretty rational people are still completely convinced that this national fraud happened and all the evidence was perfectly suppressed, because they can't believe that people would just vote for George W. Bush.
Funny you should mention 2000. Since this once hits close to home, I've become a bit of an evangelist for this bit of forgotten history. Remember all the hubbub about South Florida and the hanging chads? The court handing Bush a victory by a margin of 537 votes? While the Nations' attention was riveted to South Florida, the more devastating blow to the Gore campaign came from North Florida. How bad? 10% of the 292,000 total votes of
Duval County were nullified. 27,000 votes total. 5,000 overvotes and 22,000 undervotes. Interestingly, the majority of these undervotes came from predominantly minority, Democratic neighborhoods.
Truth is, Democrats are the ones outraged about Duval. They’re angry because close to half the voided ballots — nearly 12,000 votes — came from just four of Duval County’s 14 city districts. The four districts cover predominantly African-American areas of Jacksonville, where Vice President Al Gore won handily.
Errors occur every election. Couldn't this just be par for the course?
What’s so unusual, according to election experts such as Bob Naegele, who certifies voting machines for the Federal Election Commission, is that the normal rate of overvoting when punch-card ballots are used is roughly 0.1 percent. In Duval County last Tuesday, the rate ballooned to 7.5 percent. “That kind of percentage is just outrageous,” he says. Even in Palm Beach County, where some residents say confusion reigned on Election Day and 29,000 ballots were dismissed, the overvote rate climbed to only 4.1 percent.
But why didn't Gore contest these votes, the way his campaign did in South Florida? Here's where things get a little interesting.
Langton claims that a day after the election he asked Republican county supervisor of elections John Stafford how many ballots were nullified. “He said, ‘Oh, not that many, two or three hundred.’ I asked him, ‘When can I get exact numbers?’ He said, ‘I can’t get you that until Monday.’ But he sent those specifics to Tallahassee last Wednesday. I don’t have any reason to believe why he’d purposely misled me, but he did.”
Neither Stafford, nor his spokeswoman, returned calls for comment.
According to Gore's Northeast Florida campaign chairman, he didn't learn of the inconsistency until a local reporter called with the information. By then it was too late. While it's easy to dismiss claims of fraud as conspiracy theory, the 2000 Florida debacle had more than enough inconsistencies to warrant a hard look. Unfortunately, upon recount George W. Bush won the popular vote, 5-4.
