With 1 million Absentee Ballots Not Counted, Gore's Ballot Hi-Jacking not over yet
How come the polls were that far off?
By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Original Sources (www.originalsources.com)
November 9, 2000
For all the suspense and commotion over the year 2000 election and its importance in setting the stage for the 21st Century it did not actually get many more Americans to the voting booth than the lackluster 1996 election. In 1996 97,273274 Americans voted. So far 100,429,893 or only about 51% of the voting rolls voted in this year's presidential race.
There are still about a million votes, most of them absentee votes, still to be counted. Yet, media pundits are still making sweeping statements about the election, such as claiming that Al Gore "has won the popular vote."
No, he hasn't. At this point, no one has won anything. What we have are a lot of bumbling pundits on TV voicing their opinions about votes that have not yet been counted.
CNN's Jeff Greenfield, who clearly considers himself one of the best reporters out there, said aft er the Tuesday night debacle: "I can tell you one thing that's going to be recounted.and that's the way we count votes. I have a hunch that there's going to be enormous scrutiny about a system that calls a state for both candidates and then at (4 a.m. ET) winds up with neither."
Of course, Greenfield isn't doing any vote counting. A bunch of nameless, voiceless folks who usually serve the public with little appreciation or thanks are the people doing the vote counting. And it was people like Greenfield who were totally ignoring those nameless, voiceless vote counters, until they had made such a mess of the election that we will now probably NEVER know what the majority of the public actually wanted in the election.
By announcing Gore as the "winner" at 7:50 Eastern Standard Time, which was a couple of minutes before the polls closed in the east, and a full hour before they closed in the Florida panhandle which is in the Central Time Zone, the networks affected the vote. They had to know that was what they were doing.
In California, people who planned to vote when they got off work already had been told that Florida, Pennsylvania and New York had been won by Al Gore and many at Republican call banks urging voters to go vote got up and left the telephones. Why bother, when Jeff Greenfield and Dan Rather had already solemnly announced that the winner was Al Gore?
Based on polling data NBC led the pack in declaring Gore the winner in Florida on Tuesday at 7:50 PM. EST. Where did their information come from? At 7:50 P.M. not a single vote had been counted. Voter News Service, a consortium created by The Associated Press, ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox and NBC announced Florida in Gore's camp from exit polls.
How come the polls were that far off? Did the so-called late attack on George Bush for a 24 year old OUI charge do more damage than we thought? Was it just some creative voter fraud? Was it primarily the Network's inaccurate reporting? As I pointed out yesterday, the networks continued for two hours proclaiming Florida "won" by Gore in spite of the fact the when the precincts began to announce its count George W. Bush was consistently ahead of Gore - sometimes by 4-5 points.
There is no doubt from the angry e-mail I 'm getting that many believe this was deliberate fraud on the part of the networks to hand the White House over to Al Gore as a continuation of the "Clinton -Gore" administration.
One of the e-mails was titled: "Over One Million Votes Stolen and Gore Still Loses" and noted:
"The Battleground poll had been predicting at least a four percent lead for a month and a half prior to the election. Reliable polls before the election were giving GW six to seven points over Gore. Has the most reliable pollster suddenly become the least reliable? Did this margin just disappear or could it have been stolen?
"If you are going to steal a national election, you would focus on ten large states. That way you would minimize your chances of exposure and maximize your gains. Curiously, Gore's success was concentrated in about ten large states while he lost almost forty states to Bush.
"Anecdotes of vote fraud are starting to mount. In California, non-resident Latinos were sent what amounted to a virtual voter fraud kit, which, of course, also told them how important a Democrat victory would be for Latinos. A bus load of mentally retarded were shepharded to a voting station by a man wearing a union button, and, in a conservative district in Florida, a box full of ballots was found abandoned in a church, instead of being delivered to be counted. Are these incidents the tip of the iceberg? Is the Clinton regime the most corrupt in recent history?
"Do you believe that Hillary could jump from 45% to 57% in New York despite a complete disaster in the Middle East caused by her husband's legacy hunt and despite her close association with Arab organizations?
"The 2000 election must be a wake up call for the Republicans that MASSIVE voter fraud is to be expected. Clinton has redefined American politics, and we must think of things in Third World political terms from now on. Rush Limbaugh stated before the election that record levels of fraud would occur. Limbaugh half-jokingly predicted that people in foreign countries would be voting illegally in our election. Even that may not have been an exaggeration.
"GW Bush did not take the voter fraud threat seriously, and he very nearly lost the election as a result. His six to seven point margin over Gore was literally stolen by political hacks working in the shadows. If Bill Clinton and Al Gore would trade nuclear bomb secrets to Red China for illegal campaign donations in 1996, what in the name of all that's holy, keeps otherwise intelligent people from believing that the Democrat CAN AND WILL steal elections. Stealing one million votes in ten key states is like a traffic offense compared to committing treason by selling nuclear secrets. The Democrat Party IS completely capable of committing fraud on this massive a scale, and we had better find ways to prevent this in the future or else they will win next time."
The foreign press had a field day. The London Telegraph reported:
"The Vice-President was on his way to give his thank-you-and-goodnight speech when he got a call on his cell phone: great news! In the grand tradition of the Clinton-Gore era, they'd found a loophole!
"The British, French, German and Russian governments had already issued their congratulations to Governor Bush and were offering the usual formulations about how much they were looking forward to working with him. And then the Gore campaign honcho Bill Daley stepped up to say that, what with the situation in Florida, there was going to be a recount."
The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong reported:
"Nationally, Mr Gore actually won more votes than Mr Bush, carrying the popular vote by less than one percentage point - around 150,000 votes out of almost 100 million cast.
"But the popular vote was irrelevant since US presidential elections are decided on a state-by-state basis by the Electoral College, which came down to Florida."
In Japan Asahi reported the issue most important to the Japanese - the uncertainty of the American election on Wall Street:
"Unnerved slightly by the unresolved presidential election and concerned about a slowdown in profit growth for technology stocks, investors sent American financial markets lower in tepid trading Wednesday.
The Johannesberg, South Africa Star, never much of an admirer of America, observes on today's front page story:
"London - World reaction to the bizarre course of the American election ranged from bemusement to contempt on Wednesday, with one commentator calling the American electoral system "idiotic".
"Even with 99,9 percent of the votes counted from Tuesday's balloting, no clear winner had emerged between the Democratic candidate, Al Gore, and his Republican challenger, George W Bush. Bush's apparent victory was put on ice for at least another day-and-a-half, pending a recount in Florida.
"World leaders who had rushed to congratulate Bush were forced to row back as Gore's hopes remained alive. The Dutch even officially retracted their congratulations. London - World reaction to the bizarre course of the American election ranged from bemusement to contempt on Wednesday, with one commentator calling the American electoral system 'idiotic'".
And now we have Al Gore promising a full-scale legal attack by a battalion of lawyers - at least 70 of them - and the ever present Rev. Jesse Jackson - who are descending on the state of Florida in his behalf.
With a million absentee votes yet to be counted, Al Gore's attempt a ballot hi-jacking isn't over yet.
To comment: mmostert@originalsources.com
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