November 29, 2000


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Some Road to the Presidency
Al Gore is contesting the Presidential election not from clawing ambition,
his spinners tell us, but because he has divined that he really won. Maybe
so. A mind that can count a dimpled chad as a vote is capable of believing
about anything.

Mr. Gore's professed high-mindedness would be easier to credit, though, if
it were not washed in the casual attitude toward the truth that we have come
to expect from the author of no controlling legal authority, the Buddhist
Temple fund-raiser and the iced tea defense.

The Vice President in his Monday speech to the nation repeated the
professions of supermouthpiece David Boies, for example, that there were
10,000 votes in Miami-Dade uncounted. These are in fact votes that were
machine-counted for other offices but did not register a vote for President.
The common-sense view of such a ballot is that the voter wanted to be heard
on other offices, but did not like either candidate for President. There
were 175,000 such ballots across the state of Florida, and 1.25 million
across the nation.

What Mr. Gore really wants is to pour over the 10,000 Miami-Dade ballots in
search of the mysterious "dimpled chad" votes for him. Bear in mind that the
county's board back on Nov. 14 shut down its first recount after a sampling
of three precincts turned up only six more votes for Mr. Gore. That seemed
in retrospect to be the sort of reasonable action so thought to be missing
from this endless exercise. The Democrat sued, forcing Miami-Dade to resume.

The Gore team currently argues that Miami-Dade is an undiscovered motherlode
of Gore votes because in the 135 of 614 precincts counted they produced a
Gore gain of 157 votes. But the recount went through the precincts
numerically, and the first tranche, heavily Democratic, are known to have
voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Gore. While those 135 initially counted
precincts gave Mr. Gore 73% of their vote, the Vice President's share of the
whole county was 53%. Those potent projections of Gore numbers from a full
recount that they're citing are undoubtedly an exaggeration.

The Gore lawsuit against Palm Beach is richer still. Here they are literally
arguing that poor Judge Burton and his colleagues didn't use sufficiently
low dimple standards, what the lawsuit calls "incorrect legal standards," to
accept Gore votes. Here as well we have a Democratic county and board, upon
whom the Gore folks were heaping praise less than two weeks ago, which
they're now suing.

In Seminole County, "independent" Democrats have sued to kill absentee
ballots certified for Governor Bush, who carried those votes by almost 2 to
1. Their case: The county's elections supervisor broke the law by letting
GOP office workers enter voter identification numbers left off of request
forms sent in by absentee voters, who had otherwise complied by signing the
form and listing the last four digits of their Social Security number. Want
more detail? Normally the ID numbers are preprinted on the forms before
they're sent out, which is what the Democrats did, but the GOP's software. .
. . Oh well, the Democrats are suing.

So let's review the story so far. We had a Florida count Nov. 7, then a
recount, and then we let Al Gore pick several famously Democratic counties
to hand-count; we've let various amounts of ambiguous chads be counted, let
his party officials eyeball the ballots, often going his way by a 2 to 1
vote, let a GOP counter in Broward resign, extended the pre-established
deadline and, let's see, what else? Oh yes, Mr. Gore still lost.

The Gore/Boies strategy now is essentially to sue everyone in sight, hoping
that some cache of votes reopens (Dade) or closes up (Seminole). His lawyers
argued yesterday that he'd already be ahead if so many military ballots
weren't counted. This is not "counting every vote"; it's asking lawyers to
overturn an election, not once but several times. And it's becoming
increasingly apparent to the American people; two national polls put support
for a Gore concession at 60%, a strikingly high number given the close
election result.

As to the Democrats, a few have wavered publicly on joining the Gore long
march, but mostly the party is circling the two exhausted candidates, on the
one hand standing behind Mr. Gore's attempt to reverse the election, while
simultaneously demanding to share power with the incoming Bush
Administration.

All this said, we have in fact found one Gore gambit to really admire:
Identifying that five-minute seam of network time for a speech at 8:55 p.m.,
five minutes before the start of Monday night football. Pretty clever. The
dimpled-ballot standard may not stand up, but opening up that 8:55
prime-time window for political speech may last forever.


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