TALLY OF DADE COUNTY "UNDERVOTE" SUPPORTS BUSH WIN

By Dave Andrusko

Depending on where you live and how eager your local paper was to report results the editors may have found displeasing, you perhaps do not know that a study of the notorious "undervotes" in South Florida counties reveals that had they all been tallied George W. Bush likely would have won the presidency anyway. " Undervotes" were ballots which bore no "machine-readable vote" for president.

Results of the survey, sponsored by the Miami Herald and its parent company Knight Ridder, show that "Al Gore would have netted no more than 49 votes if a manual recount of Miami-Dade's ballots had been completed," according to the Herald.

If these 49 extra votes were added to gains Gore made in three other South Florida counties, Gore still would have fallen 140 votes short. And, with respect to the Miami-Dade ballots, Mr. Bush would actually have gained votes if the [in]famous "dimpled chad" ballots were not included, the Herald reports.

The Miami-Dade elections office identified some 10,644 ballots as undervotes. The review by the national public accounting firm, BDO Seidman, LLP, found that "1,555 bore some kind of marking that might be interpreted as a vote for Gore," according to the Herald. Likewise, 1,506 bore some kind of marking that might be interpreted as a vote for Mr. Bush. (Marking for other candidates added up to 106.)

These results fly in the face of repeated assertions that "had all the votes been counted," former Vice President Al Gore would be occupying 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Some major papers, including the Washington Post, gave the results less than prominent play.

The Post's ombudsman, Michael Getler, devoted his March 4 column to reader complaints that the Post had "buried the story." Here is the response the Post's Executive Editor Len Downie gave Getler.

Downie sniffed that "the newspaper 'would not even consider' putting on the front page a story on news media recount results in which The Post did not participate in the analysis of the data and wasn't intimately familiar with the criteria, standards, methods or interpretation of the ballot inspection." [Take that.]

Getler wrote that this "sounds like a reasonable policy for such a crucial, hot-button issue," adding, "It is also a difficult policy for The Post to explain to readers who might wonder about its motives. Yet it might have been worth finding a way to do that, much as Downie did in an Oct. 25 op-ed column explaining that an editorial page endorsement does not affect news coverage." [Right.]
While this study of the undervotes is the first to be published, it will not be the last. But the review, which took a public accounting firm over 80 hours to complete, is important because it is the first one out of the box.

More significant, however, than these numbers were the shrewd comments made the same day the results were announced (February 26) by CNN political analyst Jeff Greenfield. Interviewed on Imus in the Morning, Greenfield wryly observed that all of last November's conventional wisdom vis a vis President Bush has been proven wrong.

In neither of his two elections did former President Clinton win a majority of the vote. That did not prevent him from aggressively pursuing his agenda, a fact completely ignored by pundits who three months ago confidently predicted President Bush's narrow win would essentially immobilize him.

Greenfield pointed out that in his first five weeks President Bush had governed as if he had won with a large margin. What he didn't mention was that was exactly what Mr. Bush vowed he would do.

Whatever conclusions this or any other look at the results in Florida may suggest, President Bush understood from the get-go that he was the President.

You govern whether you prevail by 10 votes or 10 million.Again, Greenfield did not go into it, but if one wanted further evidence that Mr. Bush intends to pursue as President the issues on which he campaigned, one need go no further than his decisions to restart the pro-life "Mexico City Policy" and see through the confirmation of John Ashcroft as attorney general in the face of frenzied pro-abortion opposition.

President Bush is not only a man of his word, he is also a strong leader. After eight years of Bill Clinton, it's taking the national media a while to catch on to the enormous changeover at the White House.