Strangle the Mythbaby in Its Crib

Republicans find themselves in a similar position today. If they fail to strangle the election mythbaby in its crib, much mischief will follow and the Bush administration will begin its White House tenure under a cloud that will overshadow it, not only for the next four years but forever in the pages of history.

This monstrous infant, born on Election Day 2000, with its birth announcement widely propagated (and now perpetuated) by the media, was sired by a pack of lies and born of a pack of liars.

Its birthplace was Palm Beach County, Florida, where a ballot prepared by a Democrat elections supervisor who simply wanted to make it easier to read for the county’s large population of elderly voters, confused a small number of those coming to the polls despite the fact that a sample ballot had been mailed to them at least a week earlier.

While the polls were still open, the Gore team, sensing an opportunity to create a little mischief, hired a Texas marketing team to phone registered Democrats and suggest to them that their votes might have been nullified if they had been confused by the ballot and improperly punched the wrong holes in the ballot.

Thus was born the mythbaby who would in the days to come grow to full adulthood under the tender care of its Gore team nannies.

Some of those stirred up by the phone calls went back to the polling places and, led by Gore supporters, loudly protested that they might have voted improperly. On hand to inflame them were a local member of Congress with a well-earned reputation as a rabble-rouser, and a Florida State senator, both of whom loudly complained to the media, claiming falsely they had been contacted by hordes of hysterical voters who were in a state of absolute dejection over their alleged misvotes.

It was a setup from the beginning.

Having established the lie, the Gore people proceeded to convert it into a whopper: Thousands of Gore voters had their votes canceled because of the confusion created by the notorious "butterfly" ballot and fairness demanded a recount.

The pro-Gore print and broadcast media, eagerly following the lead of Gore campaign spokesmen, reported that scores of Jewish voters were outraged because they thought they may have mistakenly voted for Buchanan, whose position on the butterfly ballot might have confused them.

Now even if this was true, and there is absolutely no way to prove or disprove it, nothing could be done to rectify it. According to the law, as well as just plain common sense, if you screw up while voting and do nothing to correct your mistake while still in the polling place, better luck next time.

The Gore team, however, faced with certain defeat if the narrow Bush victory were allowed to stand, used the myth of thousands of miscast votes to justify a request for hand recounts of the ballots in four counties that Gore carried – Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, Broward and Volusia.

Many voters, they claimed, had been disenfranchised because their votes were never counted. But the truth is that the ballots were counted. Twice. If the voters had cast their votes for more than one candidate for the same office, for example, or otherwise messed up the punch card, the machine counted the ballot but did not tabulate it – again, the ballot was counted but the votes on it were not, because it was invalid.

These invalid ballots – the so-called undervotes – were the votes that the Gore people disingenuously insisted were never counted, as if they were thrown in a corner someplace and ignored, even though they had gone through a machine count and a machine recount.

The Gore campaign was convinced that Gore could pick up many additional votes from the 28,466 undervotes in Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. As Accuracy in Media’s Reed Irvine has pointed out: "[T]here were 62,259 such ballots statewide. These are the uncounted votes the media talk about, but Gore had no interest in recounting these ballots by hand in Republican counties. For his plan to succeed, he needed reliable Democrat vote counters."

For the most part, he got them, and they performed as expected, using their psychic powers to determine the will of the voter as they examined barely marked ballots and decided that the voter really meant to cast a ballot for Al Gore. Had this charade been allowed to continue, Gore would have – and there’s no nice way to put it – stolen the election.

The myth is that had hand recounts been allowed to continue, Gore would have scored more votes than Bush. Given the completely dishonest way in which the recounts were conducted, and the fact that they took place in heavily Democratic precincts under the direction of pro-Gore counters, that might have been true. But the first and second counts done by machines, which have no partisan biases, conclusively showed that Bush won in Florida. It was a very narrow victory – but a victory nonetheless.

The other day, at my doctor’s office, the pleasant young black nurse who did my EKG remarked quite bitterly that she had been disenfranchised even though she had voted. I asked her how she knew her vote was never counted. "Oh, I KNOW!" she said.

Obviously Jesse told her.

That’s the mythbaby in action. Somebody please strangle it while it’s still possible.

e-mail Phil Brennan:pvb@pvbr.com