All Intensive Purposes

In writing about nutjob senatorial-candidate Rep. Katherine Harris, Jonathan Chait reminds us:

[A] 2001 recount of the Florida ballots by the National Opinion Research Center, conducted for a media consortium, . . . seemed to suggest that Bush would have won even without her or the Supreme Court. The media recount came out just weeks after the September 11 attacks, and the participating newspapers appeared to bend over backward to avoid tainting President Bush's legitimacy. Some press accounts asserted that a statewide recount--which Al Gore had futilely pleaded with Bush to accept and which the Florida Supreme Court ultimately ordered--"would have favored Bush," as The Washington Post put it.

This conclusion, however pleasing to the national psyche, was totally false. . . . It rested on the assumption that only ballots that had registered no vote at all--those pesky hanging chads--would have been counted. In reality, several counties were examining ballots that had been initially disqualified for registering two votes. There turned out to be a large net gain for Gore in such ballots, which typically included a vote for Gore as well as a write-in vote for Gore. The voting machines initially disqualified these votes, but a hand examination counted them because the intent of the voter was clear. And, if those votes had been included, Gore would have carried Florida.

Which is to say nothing of the Palm Beach voters who did not mean to vote for Pat Buchanan.