Recount (2008)

[PopcornTreeCt]

I watched this for the first time today. Back in 2000, it was my first time voting. Being a Florida resident, I felt proud that my state determined the election.

I was a die hard Republican at the time. I thought the whole process of Gore pushing for recounts was ridiculous.

After watching the movie, my opinion is still the same. Even with the liberal bias the movie pushed, Bush didn't steal the election.

That's my opinion.

[Senor Javi]

I remember at one point in the film when the Democrats were going to launch a raging anti-Republican campaign to drum up outrage over the Florida Supreme Court decision, one of the lead Democratic strategists said that would only delude the issue and breed resentment. He said they should launch a legal war, not a political one. The movie would have done well to follow this advice.

[dhmac]

Originally Posted by PopcornTreeCt

I watched this for the first time today. Back in 2000, it was my first time voting. Being a Florida resident, I felt proud that my state determined the election.

I was a die hard Republican at the time. I thought the whole process of Gore pushing for recounts was ridiculous.

After watching the movie, my opinion is still the same. Even with the liberal bias the movie pushed, Bush didn't steal the election.

That's my opinion.

I still don't understand why anyone who truly supports the American democratic process would have opposed completing the statewide recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court in accordance to a state law that kicks in when the initial results are close. (That state decision was then overridden by the Supreme Court in one of the most questionable decisions in the court's history.) And the "liberal bias" of this movie was based solidly on the actual facts. If they really wanted to go "liberal" they would've pointed out that the statewide review released in 2001 had Gore winning Florida by 171 votes if a statewide recount was done and the standards set by each county were followed (which is presumably what would have happened if not for the Supreme Court's interference).

[covenant]

moar:

Gore's narrow margin in the statewide count was the result of a windfall in overvotes. Those ballots -- on which a voter may have marked a candidate's name and also written it in -- were rejected by machines as a double vote on Election Day and most also would not have been included in either of the limited recounts.

Florida law provided no mechanism to ask for a statewide recount, only county-by-county recounts. And although he did at one point call on Bush to join him in asking for a statewide recount, it was with the condition that Bush renounce all further legal action. Bush dismissed the offer, calling it a public relations gesture by his opponent, and Gore never took any further steps toward that goal.

The Florida Supreme Court's Dec. 8 order for a statewide manual recount of all undervote ballots also would have resulted in Bush as the winner, the study found. Gore's team protested when the U.S. Supreme Court on Dec. 9 agreed to the Bush campaign's request for a stay, halting that recount in midstream. But the study found that a count of all undervotes in the state would have left Bush ahead of Gore by 430 votes.

[John Slider]

The New York Times published an article in October of 2001 that reported Gore's victory over Bush by any measure. No matter what way you counted it, Al Gore defeated Bush. The article was over thirty or so paragraphs long and this little tidbit was buried in the 15th or 16th paragraph. For those of you that say "yeah, but it's the New York Times..." well, the LA Times and USA Today also picked it up and buried it in an unrelated article. Go to any of their sites and look in the October 2001 archives to find it. Thom Hartman from Air America just read it verbatim on his radio show.

Keep in mind, this still doesn't count the roughly 20k African American voters who were kept from voting by W's brother's private corporation who reported these people as potential criminals because their names were similar to those who had committed crimes IN TEXAS (not Florida).

Gore won that election.

[covenant]

I couldn't find the NYTimes article you're talking about but I found this one from Nov 2001:

A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward.

http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/po...l?pagewanted=1