It was no surprise that George W. Bush stole the 2000 election:

1. 80 percent of all votes in America are counted by only two companies: Diebold and ES&S.

2. There is no federal agency with regulatory authority or oversight of the U.S. voting machine industry. 3. The vice-president of Diebold and the president of ES&S are brothers.

4. The chairman and CEO of Diebold is a major Bush campaign organizer and donor who wrote in 2003 that he was “committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.”

5. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel used to be chairman of ES&S. He became Senator based on votes counted by ES&S machines.

6. Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, long-connected with the Bush family, was recently caught lying about his ownership of ES&S by the Senate Ethics Committee.

7. Senator Chuck Hagel was on a short list of George W. Bush’s vice-presidential candidates.

8. ES&S is the largest voting machine manufacturer in the United States and counts almost 60 percent of all United States votes.

9. Diebold's new touch screen voting machines have no paper trail of any votes. In other words, there is no way to verify that the data coming out of the machine is the same as what was legitimately put in by voters.

10. Diebold also makes ATMs, checkout scanners, and ticket machines, all of which log each transaction and could generate a paper trail.

11. Diebold is based in Ohio.

12. Diebold employed 5 convicted felons as consultants and developers to help write the central compiler computer code that counted 50% of the votes in 30 states.

13. Jeff Dean was Senior Vice-President of Global Election Systems when it was bought by Diebold. Even though he had been convicted of 23 counts of felony theft in the first degree, Jeff Dean was retained as a consultant by Diebold and was largely responsible for programming the optical scanning software now used in most of the United States.

14. Diebold consultant Jeff Dean was convicted of planting back doors in his software and using a "high degree of sophistication" to evade detection over a period of two years.

15. None of the international election observers were allowed in the polls in Ohio.

16. California banned the use of Diebold machines because the security was so bad. Despite Diebold’s claims that the audit logs could not be hacked, a chimpanzee was able to do it!

17. Thirty percent of all United States votes are carried out on unverifiable touch screen voting machines with no paper trail.

18. All -- not some -- but all the voting machine errors detected and reported in Florida went in favor of Bush or Republican candidates.

19. The governor of the state of Florida, Jeb Bush, is George W. Bush’s brother.

20. Serious voting anomalies in Florida -- again always favoring Bush -- have been mathematically demonstrated and experts are recommending further investigation.

During the legal battle to win Florida’s 25 electoral votes, Bush’s recount committee used corporate jets owned by 10 companies to ferry lawyers and campaign workers to Florida and elsewhere, according to Internal Revenue Service records and a committee lawyer. Three of those companies came under investigation in 2001 and 2002. Enron, Halliburton, and Reliant Energy were among the corporations reimbursed for the use of their corporate jets by the Bush committee during the 36-day recount.

Enron filed for bankruptcy protection in late 2001 after allegations surfaced that the energy-trader hid $1 billion in losses. CEO Ken Lay was a leading contributor to Bush’s political career. Lay and his wife donated $10,000 to the recount fund. Halliburton, the second-largest oilfield services firm, came under SEC investigation in mid-2002 for allegedly accelerating booking of revenue from construction work, an accounting change started in 1998, when Cheney was chairman and CEO. And Reliant Resources, a Houston-based energy trader that is 83 percent owned by Reliant Energy, was also investigated by the SEC in the summer of 2002 by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission for “round-trip” trades that inflated revenue and contributed to a restatement of earnings in 2001.

Several other executive jets rented by Bush’ recount committee belonged to oil industry companies, including Houston- based Anadarko Petroleum, Los Angeles-based Occidental Petroleum, and Tom Brown Incorporated-based oil- exploration company. Tom Brown was formerly headed by Don Evans, Bush’s Commerce Secretary. Bush sat on Tom Brown’s board in the early 1990s. (Bloomberg News, August 2, 2002)

BUSH'S ARROGANCE AND OVERCONFIDENCE. Prominent Republicans began questioning Bush's strategy in the final days before the election. They said that the campaign's top advisers were consumed with such confidence that they made crucial mistakes that cost Bush a comfortable victory. The biggest complaint of many Republicans was that Bush strategists, savoring polls showing consistently that they were slightly ahead in the nation-wide vote, were so certain that they had locked up many battleground states. In addition they sent Bush to states such as California and New Jersey that had little chance of winning. Finally, with their overconfidence, Bush failed to campaign on the Sunday before the election, as Gore stumped energetically in Florida and other crucial states.

Throughout the primaries and general election, the Bush campaign had been unusually confident, partly because Bush and his aides seemed to think they would win. But advisers also said that they were trying to convey a sense of inevitability to Bush's candidacy. Since the election, the Bush team had done much the same thing, striking the posture of victory, which helped explain why Bush spoke about his planning for the transition and his aides leaked the names of potential top cabinet members.

Bush operatives said that they had underestimated the potency of the Democrats' aggressive campaign towards Election Day. Most GOP strategists agreed that the campaign squandered its lead in the closing days. Scott Reed, who ran Bob Dole's campaign in 1996, said in the New York Times (November 13, 2000) that Gore was more aggressive in the end. For example, Reed emphasized the comment that Bush made -- inadvertently, his aides claimed -- that Social Security was not a federal program. Reed added, "The bottom line is Gore appeared to have a strategy to close the campaign. Gore closed very strong, picking up on the Bush mistakes of Social Security not being a government program. He used it in his free media and paid media to clobber us. Clearly, Gore picked up a bunch of senior voters near the end."

Bush's chief strategist Rove told the New York Times two days before the election in a November 5 interview, which was published on November 13, "We're going to have a six- or seven-point victory and a substantial margin in the Electoral College of 320 votes or so." After the election, he acknowledged that the Bush campaign was "surprised by the tight race." In part of that interview, Rove was enthusiastic about Florida. "We're here in Miami, man. It's going pretty wild!" Asked if Bush's campaigning in Florida so late suggested he was in trouble there, Rove replied: "Look, Florida's where you've got to come and campaign. We were likely to be in Florida under any scenario."

John Ellis, Bush's first cousin, said in the New York Times (November 13, 2000) that Bush and his aides were convinced that they would win a decisive, if not comfortable, margin and that they did not have to worry much about many states they ended up losing -- including Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Iowa. Roger Stone, a Republican strategist, said, "Had Bush not taken that Sunday off, I don't think he'd be in this situation. The guy thought he was coasting toward a big win." Bill Dal Col, who ran the losing Senate campaign of Congressman Rick Lazio, said, ""In the last four days in particular, Gore looked like he was running a 100-yard dash, and Bush looked like a guy who was finishing a 26-mile marathon."

Mel Sembler, the Republicans national finance chairman in Florida, told the Times that Bush operatives thought they were in a more comfortable position in his state. "We were maybe a little bit too confident down here." And Richard Bond, a former Republican national chairman, said he was puzzled at the time that Bush was not focusing more on certain battleground states but figured his advisers knew what they were doing. "I thought they were a tough, disciplined bunch and had a very good reason," Bond said.

By contrast, Gore from the start was known as a more relentless campaigner than Bush. Gore's camp worked more diligently, in part, because his advisers felt far less assured of a victory. And so they placed far more emphasis in states like Florida, Wisconsin, and Michigan than did Bush. Gore even campaigned non-stop into the early morning hours of Election Day. The Gore operation was also more aggressive in the final days in producing new commercials and emphasizing issue differences with Bush.

At every turn, Bush knew that he and his backers would do whatever it took and say whatever was needed to win. He knew that his backers were in key positions on every level and throughout every branch of government and the media, and they would do what was needed to have him win. After all, it was also in their best interests to do so. It was simply business as usual. After Bush was anointed president by the Electoral College, his next task was to attempt to convince the majority of the American people that he was justified in making decisions in their name by declaring himself "legitimate," even though fewer Americans voted for him than for Gore.

According to the New York Times (November 21, 2000), Bush behaved as if it were not a close election at all -- as if he had won by a landslide. The Texas governor tried to create the illusion that every last vote in Florida be hand-counted to determine the winner was only an effort to steal the election from him. In Bush's view, under no condition could Gore ever be deemed the legitimate next president. By opposing any hand counts, the New York Times said that Bush left himself no room to be a gracious loser. "He has left no scenario in which to say: ‘I lost fairly. Now let's all rally behind Al Gore.' "

Bush needed to remember that he lost the popular vote in the country and he was ahead in Florida by a minuscule number of votes. The fact was that the election was too close to call. Therefore, a hand count was both legal and legitimate, especially when it was done under the same rules that apply in Texas.

Gore made a fair proposal to hand-count every ballot in Florida, but Bush rejected that. Then when a more limited hand count proceeded, the Bush forces made wild, unsubstantiated allegations that the hand counters were engaged in fraud. No doubt there were disputes, and mistakes, but there was no proof of systematic fraud. Where Gore was vulnerable was on which hand counts to use. Texas law allows for "dimpled" but unperforated ballots to be counted, and some Florida counties were doing that. But Gore had to think hard about whether he wanted to win on dimples.

Either way, though, the Bush team smeared him. It was out to create an impression in the public's mind that if Gore won by a hand count then by definition, he stole the election. Bush's communications director Hughes basically accused Gore of conspiring to have the absentee ballots of American military personnel not counted, implying that this made him unfit to be commander in chief. Democrats and Republicans both know that many absentee ballots are always thrown out. Absentee balloting historically has been rife with fraud, so there are a lot of technical requirements -- including that a ballot be postmarked by Election Day. And in this case the decision to follow the strict Florida absentee balloting rules, as opposed to the looser federal ones, was set by the Republican secretary of state.

THE POWER GAME. To win the election, The Guardian (November 26, 2000) reported that Bush spent $447 million, 25 percent more than Gore reported. The key to Bush's money empire was his father's post-White House work which raised the family's net worth by several hundred per cent. But it took much more than money from the Bush's dynasty to buy the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

The 2000 election will be remembered for more than the cliffhanger presidential race. The campaign also essentially buried federal limits on the role of money in American national elections. Record-shattering sums -- and new ways to get them into campaigns in large, unregulated amounts -- superceded the restrictions that had been imposed after the Watergate scandal.

According to the Los Angeles Times (December 8, 2000), both major parties reported that a total of $2 billion for federal offices was spent, $500 million more than what was spent in 1996. Bush refused federal funding for the primaries because that would have forced him to accept spending limits. As a result, he waged the first privately financed $100-million campaign in American history. Furthermore, independent interest groups, exploiting loopholes in campaign spending laws, pumped record-shattering dollars in some congressional districts. Soft money, which in the 1992 election accounted for less than one-fifth of the two major parties' total receipts, rose to nearly half of their $878 million in 2000. The Republicans took in $211 million and the Democrats $199 million -- 500 percent more than in 1992. The Democratic National Committee raised $116.3 million in soft money, half its total, while the Republican National Committee's $109.8 million in soft money was just over one-third of its total.

The 1876 election was the last time an election had been stolen. Democrat Samuel Tilden was one electoral vote shy of reaching a majority in the Electoral College. In three Southern states, one of which was Florida, both Republicans and Democrats certified that their candidate had carried all of those states. In the confusion, Congress ratified the Electoral Count Act which provided for seven Republicans, seven Democrats, and one independent to choose the next president. The one independent on the Supreme Court resigned when he was elected to the Senate. That left only Republicans on the highest court, and the chosen justice cast his vote for Hayes to break the tie.

One hundred and twenty-four years later, Florida Governor Jeb Bush promised to deliver Florida to his brother. Everyone knew that Gore carried Florida. Gore knew. And Bush knew. It took an accumulation of several dirty tactics to push Bush over the top in the most closely contested election in 124 years. Bush's resort to such Machiavellian tactics was no surprise. During the primary campaign, his surrogates went so far as to suggest McCain sold out to the Communists in Vietnam and to smear his 9-year-old adopted Bangladeshi daughter.

The Miami Herald (December 3, 2000) reported that Gore would have carried Florida had if all the state's contested ballots had been error-free and completely counted. The Miami Herald said the analysis that it commissioned indicated that Gore would have won a flawless Florida election by 23,000 votes, capturing the state's key 25 electoral college votes. For the analysis, the newspaper said that its reporters collected data for all of Florida's 5,885 voting precincts, including absentee ballots and those disqualified for such reasons as showing no vote for president or more than one vote for president. The extra 185,000 uncounted votes were then shared out to Gore, Bush, and third-party candidates, according to ratios drawn from the official tabulations in each precinct. The newspaper said that the analysis assumed all ballots included a vote for president, an idea questioned by Republicans.

The Miami Herald questioned Republicans who insisted that the analysis by Stephen Doig of Arizona State University was "statistical voodoo." Doig told the newspaper that Gore's victory statewide would have narrowed to 1,443 votes. Furthermore, Doig contended that Gore's lead would have held up even if as many as 90 percent of the 185,000 uncounted ballots were excluded on the assumption that those voters had ignored the presidential election and had voted for only state and local offices.

THE ABSENTEE VOTES: THE GOP'S STRATEGY TO ELECT BUSH. A New York Times investigation into overseas ballots that helped Bush win the presidency found that Florida election officials, facing intense GOP pressure to accept military votes, counted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws. The newspaper's six-month examination of the 2,490 overseas ballots accepted after Election Day found 680 questionable votes. (New York Times, July 15, 2001)

When the Bush team knew that the outcome of the election hinged on the Florida vote, the Republicans Party mounted a legal and public relations campaign to persuade canvassing boards in Bush strongholds to waive the state's election laws when counting overseas absentee ballots. According to a six-month study conducted by the New York Times, their goal was to count the maximum number of overseas ballots in counties won by Bush, particularly those with a high concentration of military voters, while seeking to disqualify overseas ballots in counties won by Gore. (New York Times, July 15, 2001)

Under Florida standards, all overseas ballots needed to show clear evidence they were cast on or before Election Day and mailed from outside the United States. State law required all overseas ballots to have foreign postmarks. In addition, a state rule said that such ballots must be either "postmarked or signed and dated" by Election Day.

But most of the ballots did not have dated signatures because only one of Florida's 67 counties even provided a spot on the ballot for a voter to write a date next to his or her signature. This seemingly obscure postmark standard was suddenly of crucial importance to the Bush strategists. Hundreds of overseas ballots that they wanted counted met neither requirement -- the envelopes had no postmarks, and the signatures had no dates. Not only were ballots coming in without postmarks, the Bush team had also heard scattered accounts of ballots sitting in mailbags on the decks of Navy ships.

On November 8, Bush's team began plotting strategy on overseas ballots. Their first thoughts were about the potential for fraud, according to interviews and internal strategy documents obtained by the New York Times. They looked at every angle. Democrats could urge liberal Israelis to send in ballots. Or they might interfere with the delivery of ballots from Navy ships, military installations, and American embassies.

Three days later, the Bush campaign understood that defending against fraud alone was too limited a strategy. To take full advantage of Bush's support in the military, offensive measures would be needed too. And with Gore closing the gap in the recounts, Bush strategists said in interviews that they calculated that they would need a net gain of 1,000 votes among the overseas ballots to seal victory.

Meanwhile, the Bush campaign worked through channels to communicate directly with military personnel overseas, encouraging them to send in their absentee ballots. GOP Congressman Steve Buyer, a member of the House Armed Services Committee, requested from the Pentagon the phone numbers or e-mail addresses of a number of service men and women. The New York Times learned that this information was used to put sailors in contact with Florida Republicans who were organizing a public relations campaign to persuade counties to reconsider rejected ballots.

The first message, which the New York Times obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, was sent at 9:29 p.m. on November 22 from Washington to senior officers on the George Washington in the Mediterranean. Other messages followed. Through the e-mail, the Bush campaign could directly encourage them to send in their absentee ballots.

Under intense pressure from the Republicans, Florida officials accepted hundreds of overseas absentee ballots that failed to comply with state election laws. In an analysis of the 2,490 ballots from Americans living abroad that were counted as legal votes after Election Day, the New York Times found 680 questionable votes. Although it was not known for whom the flawed ballots were cast, four out of five were accepted in counties carried by Bush. And Bush's final margin in the official total was 537 votes.

The flawed votes included ballots without postmarks, ballots postmarked after the election, ballots without witness signatures, ballots mailed from towns and cities within the United States, and even ballots from voters who voted twice. All would have been disqualified had the state's election laws been strictly enforced. The Republican push on absentee ballots forced Gore's team to push for manual recounts in mainly Democratic counties in southern Florida.

In its investigation, the New York Times found that these overseas ballots -- the only votes that could legally be received and counted after Election Day -- were judged by markedly different standards, depending on where they were counted. This strategy conflicted with statements made by Bush's campaign leaders and by the Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. They had stated that rules should be applied uniformly and certainly not changed in the middle of a contested election. It also conflicted with the equal protection guarantee that the United States Supreme Court invoked in December when it halted a state-wide manual recount and effectively handed Bush the presidency.

The study found no evidence of vote fraud by either party. While some voters admitted in interviews that they had cast illegal ballots after Election Day, the investigation found no support for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had organized an effort to solicit late votes. Instead, the Republicans concentrated on overseas absentee ballots, since most of those votes went to Bush. In Washington, Bush campaign officials urged the Pentagon to expedite the collection and delivery of military ballots. As it turned out, these ballots arrived more quickly than they had in previous elections. Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee helped the campaign obtain private contact information for military voters.

In the end, the vast majority of the ballots -- 97 percent -- arrived before the November 17 deadline. In previous elections, according to records and interviews, as many as a third arrived after the 10-day window had closed. But the New York Times investigation indicated that the push to get the ballots in quickly only aggravated a problem that had concerned the Bush camp: 17 percent of military ballots arrived without postmarks, despite military regulations that required all mail to be postmarked. There was no evidence that the Pentagon knowingly delivered ballots cast illegally after Election Day.

The lack of postmarks made it impossible for canvassing boards to answer the threshold questions that determined the validity of an overseas vote: Was the ballot indeed mailed from a foreign country? And was it mailed on or before Election Day? The lack of postmarks also posed political problems for the Bush strategists. Some Bush advisers, still fearful of votes from Israel, were preparing to seek strict enforcement of the postmark standard, according to documents and interviews. The Bush campaign even dispatched Jim Smith, a former Florida secretary of state, to emphasize the postmarking rule at a news conference on November 12.

Still, the Bush team tried to ensure that local election officials set aside the state's rules on late postmarking that would have excluded hundreds of ballots. In a single phrase of federal law, they found the statutory tool by which the Bush team would seek to undo Florida's postmarking rules. The phrase was contained in the Uniformed and Overseas Citizens Absentee Voting Act, a 1986 federal law intended to make overseas voting easier. One part of the law, a directive to postal officials, states that overseas ballots "shall be carried expeditiously and free of postage." Although the law said nothing about postmarks, those eight words demonstrated that Congress never intended to require postmarks on overseas military ballots. Bush's lawyers knew that they were putting their faith in an untested legal theory. The same federal law emphasized the importance of state election rules.

As a backup, they used a 1975 Florida Supreme Court ruling that said as long as there were no signs of fraud, canvassing boards had some discretion to accept ballots with minor flaws -- such as putting a signature in the wrong place or omitting a witness's address. So they used this argument to get the get military ballots counted. However, this conflicted with the Bush strategy to thwart manual recounts. In public statements by lead counsel James Baker, and in the campaign's legal briefs, the Bush team argued repeatedly that it was unfair and patently unconstitutional for Gore to seek liberal recount standards in Democratic strongholds.

Secretary of State Harris said nothing about the absentee ballots until November 13, when she touched on them at the end of a televised statement that focused mainly on trying to bring an end to the South Florida recounts. In her statement, she said that the overseas ballots had to be "executed" -- a vague word that could have meant either signed or both signed and dated -- by Election Day and that they had to bear a foreign postmark. Then she added, "They are not required, however, to be postmarked on or prior to" Election Day.

According to the New York Times, Republicans provided their lawyers with instructions, showing how to challenge likely Gore votes while fighting for more likely Bush votes. In some counties where Gore was strong, Bush lawyers stood by silently while Gore lawyers challenged overseas ballots, even likely Gore ballots.

The double-standard strategy of the GOP was reflected in how different counties counted ballots. In counties carried by Gore, 2 in 10 ballots that had no evidence they were mailed on or before Election Day were accepted. In counties carried by Bush, 6 in 10 of the same kinds of ballots were counted. Bush counties were four times as likely as Gore counties to count ballots lacking witness signatures and addresses.

In reconstructing the story of the absentee vote, the New York Times collected copies of virtually all the overseas ballot envelopes that arrived after Election Day and built a comprehensive database for statistical analysis. The Times also examined thousands of pages of election documents and canvassing board meeting transcripts and interviewed more than 300 voters in 43 countries. Because the ballots themselves were separated from the envelopes containing voter information, it was impossible to know whether the outcome of the election would have been different had the flawed ballot envelopes been treated consistently.

Many of the 680 flawed ballots in the analysis of the overseas envelopes had multiple defects, so the total number of flaws exceeds the number of defective ballots. The following questionable ballots were found:

344 ballots with no evidence they were cast on or before Election Day. They had late, illegible or missing postmarks.

183 ballots with United States postmarks.

96 ballots lacking the required signature or address of a witness.

169 ballots from voters who were not registered, who failed to sign the envelope or who had not requested a ballot. A request is required by federal law.

5 ballots received after the Nov. 17 deadline.

19 voters cast two ballots, both of which counted.

In mid-1999 -- more than a year before the election -- Secretary of State Harris paid $4 million to Database Technologies to scour Florida’s voter rolls and to remove anyone “suspected” of being a felon. Database responded by wiping out the names of 173,000 registered voters. In Miami-Dade county, 66 percent of those names removed were Black voters. And 54% of those taken off the rolls in Tampa county were Black.

It turned out that many of these felons had already served prison time and that they had their suffrage right restored. And others had been convicted of misdemeanors which did not preclude them from the right to vote.

A New York Times in July 2001 probe showed that 680 of the 2,490 overseas ballots were considered flawed and questionable. Yet, those votes were allowed to be counted. Records indicated that Bush got the overseas vote by a ratio of 4-to-5. Considering that percentage, Bush received 537 votes which should have been disqualified.

The official results in Florida had Bush winning by 544. If the 537 votes would have been tossed out -- and well they should have -- Bush would have had a winning margin of seven votes.

Gary King, a Harvard expert on voting patterns and statistical models, told the New York Times that there was no way to declare a winner with mathematical certainty under those circumstances. His best estimate was that Bush's margin would have been reduced to 245 votes. King estimated that there was only a slight chance that discarding the questionable ballots would have made Gore the winner.

JEB BUSH'S UNETHICAL ROLE. When it became clear that the disputed Florida election could deliver the White House to his brother, Jeb Bush immediately recused himself from any official role in the recount. He promised to avoid even the "slightest appearance of a conflict of interest." He directed his staff to spend their time on government business and pledged to do the same.(Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)

Despite that hands-off policy, the Florida governor's office made 95 telephone calls to the George W. Bush presidential campaign, its advisors, lawyers, and staffers during the 36-day recount period, records showed. At least 10 calls came from an office number used primarily by Jeb Bush, including one call to a private line in George W. Bush's gubernatorial office in Austin. Another call from Jeb Bush's number went to Karl Rove. One went to the Texas governor's chief of staff, Clay Johnson. Another went to Michigan Governor John Engler who soon flew to Florida to monitor the ballot recount in Broward County. Additional calls were logged to cell phones assigned to Bush campaign staffers. (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)

In a reply to Los Angeles Times reporter Lisa Getter, Jeb Bush said in an e-mail that he could not recall the purpose of the calls: "Lisa, I have no clue what these calls were about. They most likely were return phone calls. In the alternative, they could have been my assistant passing on a request for an invitation to speak or an autographed picture. They might have been answering a request on where to eat in Tallahassee for the hoards of Austin folks that made their way here. They could have been for many reasons. I cannot remember.” (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)

But some supporters of Gore questioned whether Jeb Bush used his position to influence events behind the scenes after the election. It appeared as if he was more involved than he had publicly acknowledged. Jeb Bush visited the state GOP headquarters in Tallahassee that functioned as the Bush campaign command center for the recount at least once. He also dialed into at least one conference call with campaign operatives, aides said. And days after the recount ended, he hired Kathleen Shanahan, the Bush-Cheney deputy campaign manager, as his chief of staff in Tallahassee. Al Cardenas, chairman of the Florida Republican Party, said, "I talked to him every few days." Although Cardenas said the governor "took himself out of the strategy end of things," he said that Bush was kept abreast of developments in each of the state's 67 counties and given a "heads up on litigation." (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)

Randy Enwright, a political consultant to the George W. Bush campaign in Florida, said he spoke to Jeb Bush "a couple of times" during the recount period but said he did not recall the substance of the conversations. Enwright said, "He was trying to be as objective and fair as possible. But he obviously cared about getting his brother elected." (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)

The Los Angeles Times filed a public records request to obtain Jeb Bush's personal cell phone records, the visitors' log to his mansion, his daily calendar, and his phone messages during the recount. The phone records showed 34 calls from the governor's office to the Bush for President campaign office in Miami. Six were made November 22, the day the Miami-Dade canvassing board abruptly abandoned its manual recount. The governor's office also made a call that day to the Miami law firm that employed Miguel De Grandy who represented the Bush campaign before the canvassing board. An additional 25 calls were made to the Washington law firm then known as Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal. Law firm partner Michael Carvin wrote briefs for the George W. Bush campaign during the recount and argued his case before the Florida Supreme Court. In addition, several of the firm's associates flew to Tallahassee to help. (Los Angeles Times, July 14, 2001)

Bush's legal staff also phoned the Washington offices of the Los Angeles law firm of Gibson, Dunn and Crutcher on December 5, the day after the United States Supreme Court sent the recount case back to Florida. Theodore Olson and a team of lawyers from that firm worked on the case for the Bush campaign. After he was elected, George W. Bush appointed Olson solicitor general.

STUDIES INDICATE GORE WAS THE WINNER. A study conducted by California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology concluded that between 4 million and 6 million Americans either failed to cast votes or had their votes invalidated in the election. The report was the first analysis of the 2000 presidential election that studied the entire national vote. The large number of disqualified ballots was largely a result of faulty equipment, mismarked ballots, polling place failures, and foul-ups with registration or absentee voting. (Washington Post, July 17, 2001)

MIT and Cal Tech researchers estimated that 40 million registered voters in the United States did not participate in the election. Roughly 7 percent -- or about 3 million voters -- said they failed to vote because of registration problems, and another 1 million cited “long lines” or other polling place shortcomings. The research showed that faulty equipment or confusing ballots caused 1.5 million to 2 million votes to be unmarked or mismarked. The study also revealed that poor and minority voters were more than three times as likely as wealthy ones to have their ballots discarded. In all, the researchers estimated that between 4 million and 6 million votes were lost in the election. (Washington Post, July 17, 2001)

A study by the Orlando Sentinel in December 2000 revealed about 3,000 overvotes in Lake County. The study found more than 600 valid ballots that had been ignored by the machines, with Gore picking up 130 even in this heavily pro-Bush county.

In January 2001, the Chicago Tribune reported that in 15 Florida counties with a particularly high rate of overvotes, more than 1,700 votes that showed a clear choice had been discarded. Most of the counties in the Tribune’s study were small, rural, and predominantly Republican. Yet even so Gore’s net gain was 366 votes.

The Palm Beach Post evaluation of the election showed that if all votes were counted -- from the dimple to chads barely hanging on ballots – Gore would have had a net gain of 784 votes in Palm Beach County, if the board had also counted the 5,361 ballots that had a dimpled chad. That would be enough to carry the state’s 25 electoral votes. (Palm Beach Post, January 11, 2001; March 11, 2001

A study by USA Today showed that Gore won, even if one did not count the 15,000-25,000 votes that the newspaper estimated he lost because of: (1) illegally designed “butterfly ballots,” or (2) the hundreds of predominantly African-American voters who were falsely identified by the state as felons and turned away from the polls. Gore won even if there was no adjustment for Bush’s windfall of about 290 votes from improperly counted military absentee ballots where lax standards were applied to Republican counties and strict standards to Democratic ones. The analysis found that Gore won regardless of which standard was applied and even when varying county judgments were factored in. Counting fully punched chads and limited marks on optical ballots, Gore won by 115 votes. With any dimple or optical mark, Gore won by 107 votes. With one corner of a chad detached or any optical mark, Gore won by 60 votes. Applying the standards set by each county, Gore won by 171 votes. (USA Today, November 12, 2001

The Washington Post scrutinized computerized records of 2.7 million ballots in Florida’s eight largest counties. The study concluded that, had all the ballots been properly counted, Gore would have carried Florida, regardless of which standard of counting ballots was applied. The study of 2.7 million votes cast in eight of Florida’s largest counties showed that overvotes trended toward Gore at a rate of three to one. Add these together, even with the new undervote count, and Bush would have lost Florida. When fully punched chads or dimpled chads were counted, Gore would have carried Florida by between 60 and 171 votes. (Washington Post, January 28, 2001)

Another study by the Washington Post in November 2001 examined 175,010 Florida ballots. It concluded that Gore could have had a net gain of 662 votes in a hand recount of optical overvotes, almost entirely because of those double-bubbles. But the state-wide recount, ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and stopped by the United States Supreme Court the following day, specified only undervotes would be examined and not overvotes.

In Miami-Dade County precincts where fewer than 30 percent of the voters were Blacks, about 3 percent of ballots did not register a vote for president. In precincts where more than 70 percent of the voters were Blacks, it was nearly 10 percent. Some 40 percent of the state’s Black voters were new voters, and election experts said that they were the most vulnerable to confusion about oddly designed ballots. (Washington Post, December 3, 2000)

DISCRIMINATION AGAINST BLACKS. One specific factor that allowed Bush to steal the election was racial injustice. The more Black and Democratic a precinct, the more likely it was to suffer high rates of invalidated votes.

Many minority voters, who were registered and had voted for years, were told they did not appear on voter lists. Voters without Florida IDs were turned away, though the law said they could cast “affidavit ballots.” In some counties, minority voters said they were asked for a photo ID -- while Anglo voters were not -- or turned away even when they showed up with a voter card and photo ID. People who lacked a photo ID or were not on the voting list were put into a “problem line,” where they were told that voting officials were trying to call headquarters to find out what to do. But the lines were jammed and they just could not get through. Many discouraged voters gave up and went home. (Village Voice, November 29, 2000)

Many Blacks were harassed and intimidated by police in some counties, and turned away by registrars who claimed a shortage of ballots. Some Blacks were mistakenly removed from voter rolls because their names were similar to those of ex-convicts. Many arrived at polls only to be told they were not registered. Others were told they could not vote because they had been mailed absentee ballots -- ballots the voters complained they had not sought. Still other Blacks were harassed, turned away, or given misleading ballot instructions. In several counties, there were long lines of Blacks waiting to vote. Assuming there was confusion and faced with a long wait, many turned around and went home. However in affluent Anglo precincts, voters had modern, optical scanners, and lower rates of uncounted ballots. (New York Times, December 1, 2000; Mother Jones, November 8, 2000)

In counties comprised of a high percentage of Democrats and Blacks, antiquated voting machines that dated back to the 1950s were used. These machines did not immediately check ballots for errors -- so Blacks were less likely than Whites to get a chance to correct their ballots if they made mistakes. While hundreds and probably thousands of Black ballots were disqualified because of faulty machines in those areas, more affluent Florida counties had modern voting equipment which had a much smaller degree of failure.

About 26 percent of Black voters lived in counties that verified ballots as valid in precincts as soon as they were cast. Consequently, poll workers could immediately tell voters that they disqualified ballots, and voters had a second chance to cast a valid ballot. By comparison, 34 percent of Anglo voters lived in these areas. That meant Anglo voters were more likely to have their votes counted than Blacks. Voters, whose ballots were checked immediately, were using cutting-edge optical scanners, which read pen marks. The other voters were using either optical scanners that did not check ballots instantly, or punch-card machines in which voters punch out chads to make a selection.

Some Blacks were turned away by registrars who claimed a shortage of ballots in others. Others reported of being harassed, turned away, or given misleading ballot instructions. Some said they were mistakenly removed from voter rolls, because their names were similar to those of ex-convicts. Some Black registered voters arrived at polls only to be told they were not registered. Others were told they could not vote, because they had been mailed absentee ballots -- ballots the voters complained they had not sought. In at least one case, Blacks found their traditional polling site -- an elementary school -- had been razed and complained that they had not been given an alternative. (Mother Jones, November 8, 2000)

Florida A&M students had always voted on campus. When they went to vote in the 2000 election, they were told that they had to go somewhere else to vote this time. When they went to the precinct to which they had been directed, they were told that they were not registered to vote there and were turned away and did not get to vote. (Village Voice, November 29, 2000)

Car pools of African-American voters were stopped by police, and in some cases, officers demanded to see a “taxi license.” Some polls located in minority areas closed with people still in line in Tampa. In Osceola County, ballots did not line up properly, possibly causing Gore voters to have their ballots cast for Harry Browne. Latino voters were required to produce two forms of identification when only one is required. (Los Angeles Times, November 11, 2000; Associated Press, November 11, 2000)

THE MEDIA DOWNPLAY THE ALLEGATIONS OF RACISM. The main stream media ignored most of the charges of racial discrimination. Not until November 30 was a major newspaper study of the race charges published. The New York Times ran a lengthy Page 1 article headlined, "Arriving at Florida Voting Places, Some Blacks Found Frustration." The Times did extensive interviewing and computer analysis, finding that some Black voters, "it is unclear exactly how many," were "turned away from the polls." The Times examined charges that many of Florida's black voters were prevented from casting their ballots. "Interviews with election officials and voters across the state suggest that some African-Americans -- it is unclear exactly how many -- were turned away from the polls." The article noted the state's tarnished history in dealing with minority voters, but found little racist intent in this election. "Interviews around the state suggest that the most significant obstacles confronting Black voters appear to have stemmed from logistical problems."

The Times story said that extremely high turnout among black Florida voters led to a buckling of the election system. The story documented how areas with high numbers of black voters had weak election technology. The Times also reported that Florida election officials devised a laptop program allowing local election officials to tap directly into the master database in Tallahassee to determine whether a voter who did not show up on local rolls was in fact registered to vote. But only one of the laptop computers was distributed to a Black area.

It was not until 10 days later that another story on racial discrimination appeared in the mainstream media. The Boston Globe (December 10, 2000) reported that the precincts equipped with laptops favored Bush. In predominantly Black precincts, if a voter found his or her name wrongly omitted from the rolls, a polling place worker had to try to get through to Tallahassee on the phone, and the lines were invariably busy. In Miami-Dade County, Black votes were thrown out at four times the rate of white votes.

The same day, the Washington Post (December 10, 2000) did a precinct-by-precinct analysis and found that "heavily Democratic and African-American neighborhoods in Florida lost many more presidential votes than other areas because of outmoded voting machines and rampant confusion." And the Miami Herald (December 10, 2000) did a statistical analysis of the statewide vote that suggested that areas with large numbers of Democratic voters, many of which have large Black populations, had a greater chance of ballots being thrown out than the statewide average.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune (December 10, 2000) reported that the media's lack of interest was connected to the low profile of some of the journalists' main sources. The Star Tribune placed most of the blame on the Gore campaign staff which was cautious in pushing forward the grievances -- perhaps fearful of being overly identified as the candidate of Blacks.

However, the foreign media did not totally ignore charges of racism. The first charge of racial discrimination appeared in a front-page story in The Times of London (November 13, 2000). It opened with this sentence: "The FBI is being asked to investigate how thousands of mainly black supporters of Al Gore were given ballot papers that had allegedly already been marked for rival candidates." The story told of 17,000 ballots in the Miami area that had been tampered with and compared it to an act of "organized corruption."

KATHERINE HARRIS’ DISCLOSURE TWO YEARS LATER. In the summer of 2002, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris acknowledged that she failed to follow an election law herself and abruptly resigned. Harris said she made a mistake when she qualified to run for Congress by failing to submit a letter of resignation required of all state officeholders seeking federal office. She said she did not think the law applied to her because Florida’s elected secretary of state post was being abolished in January. She said, “I just made that assumption. I should have read the law. I didn’t. I take full responsibility.” (St. Petersburg Times, August 2, 2002)

The resignation letter would have allowed her to remain in office until January, though she repeatedly insisted she planned to resign early. State law required all state officials to submit a resignation letter when they qualify to run for federal office. Otherwise they faced “an automatic irrevocable resignation, effective immediately, from the office he or she presently holds.” (St. Petersburg Times, August 2, 2002)

REFORMING FLORIDA LAW? Two days after Bush officially became designated as president-elect, Governor Jeb Bush announced that he was forming a blue-ribbon commission to study election procedure. It was an ironic twist since his brother barely carried the popular vote in Florida as a result of faulty equipment and questionable voting procedures. Additionally, thousands of Blacks were intimidated and confused at the polling place. There were unhelpful poll workers, confusing ballot directions, precinct changes, and roadblocks in front of polling places that gave the appearance of "Jim Crow-era technology."

Black leaders were furious and cynical. Many black leaders said that it was a sham since decades of progress had been reversed. Political analysts said the One Florida backlash helped drive black voters to the polls in record numbers to vote against Bush's brother. In Election 2000, 900,000 blacks voted, compared to 500,000 in 1996. About 9 out of 10 voted for Gore.

Florida Blacks said that they did not believe that Governor Bush would do anything concrete about a problem that affects them in a major way. The Florida Conference of Black State Legislators announced that it planned legislation to deal with election problems. Frederica Wilson, a state representative from Miami who headed the Black conference, said in the New York Times (December 14, 2000), "We believe there are three sides to this issue: A Democratic side, a Republican side and a people-of-color side. And we don't think Jeb Bush is the one to help us."

The Black leadership in Florida wanted an independent panel to investigate -- not one appointed by the brother of Republican presidential candidate Bush. The lawmakers acknowledged that such reform would not straighten out current election tangles and may not have an impact on elections for years.

Not only was Governor Bush's announcement to piece together a panel met with sharp criticism, but his close friend Tom Feeney, the conservative speaker of the Florida House, inflamed Democrats by saying "What a loser" during Gore's concession speech. The Los Angeles Times (December 15, 2000) reported that Feeney apologized and attempted to downplay his derogatory comment, claiming that it was "just a joke." Nevertheless, several Democratic lawmakers were outraged by Feeney's comments and boycotted the election reform news conference Governor Bush had organized. Conspicuously absent was Tom Rossin, the West Palm Beach Democrat and Senate minority leader. Rossin said, "What Feeney said was not excusable in any way. I didn't want to be seen at the podium with him."

In addition, Blacks legislators said it was wrong for Governor Bush to exclude them from the news conference after the volume of voting complaints logged in black communities this last month. Relations between Bush and Black legislators had been poor for some time, partly due to an executive order Bush signed in 1999 ending the state's affirmative action policies.

Black lawmakers said that would form their own election reform task force because they did not trust Governor Bush to help them. The Florida Legislature's Black caucus enlisted the support of the Jesse Jackson and the United States Department of Justice to investigate allegations of voter discrimination. Bush asked two Black lawmakers have been asked to sit on the 21-member election task force.

Democratic National Committee spokeswoman Jenny Backus said, "There are a lot of questions here, there are a lot of angry Floridians. People are talking about taking away somebody's constitutional right to vote, there are thousands, literally thousands of reports of irregularities." One reason for the no-vote ballots could be the failure of voters to push a complete hole through the computer punch-card ballots. The only way to determine whether a voter indeed voted but failed to make a sufficient hole is through the laborious procedure of having the ballots recounted by hand by a bipartisan committee to determine the voter's intent.

THE CONSERVATIVE MEDIA. Gore received decidedly more negative media coverage than Bush did during the fall campaign period, according to a study from the Project for Excellence in Journalism along with Princeton Survey Research Associates and published in the Los Angeles Times (November 1, 2000). Both candidates received about the same amount of coverage, said the study. But about 24 percent of the stories about Bush were positive, compared to 13 percent for Gore. Among stories dealing equally with both candidates, 12 percent treated Gore negatively, while only 8 percent cast Bush in a negative light. One way Gore suffered was by not performing up to press expectations during the presidential debates, the report found.

The study reviewed 1,149 stories from four newspapers -- the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Portland Oregonian, and the Orlando Sentinel -- eight television news programs, and five Web sites. It looked at coverage during September and October. Of all the stories, about 57 percent focused on the internal dynamics of campaigning. About 29 percent dealt with issues and 13 percent focused on the candidates' character or record. Overall, it found coverage of both candidates had been predominantly negative over October, with the majority of stories containing at least twice as many negative assertions as positive ones.

Tom Rosenstiel, director of the project and a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times, said the results suggest " the press may be somewhat cynical about the public. hey think the public isn't really interested in ideas. o matter what they say, journalists sort of hesitate to write policy stories because they think no one will read them." Rosenstiel said that when the coverage turned to the candidates, it conveyed a negative tone because Bush and Gore were "two somewhat flawed candidates."

Another reason the coverage seemed so negative, he said, was that the study included stories posted on such Web sites as Salon, Slate, and National Review Online. At least 60 percent of the stories on those sites carried a negative tone, the study found, compared to 53 percent of newspaper articles and 41 percent of television news stories.

The media rarely picked up on Bush's gaffes and towards the end of the campaign. Instead, they frequently accentuated Gore's misstatements, giving ammunition to the relentless Bush machine to attack the vice president's credibility. And the media painted a picture of Bush as the popular candidate and a winner who was running an energized campaign.

Charlie Peters, editor of the Washington Monthly, laid the blame for Gore's lack of popularity on the media. He was quoted in the Washington Post (November 2, 2000) as saying, "I don't think the press is anti-Gore. ... The problem is not bias, it's intellectual shiftlessness -- paying too little attention to the major but sometimes complex issues of the campaign and far too much attention to matters that are minor but easily susceptible to ridicule and to clever one-liners that get journalists booked on the talk shows."

Salon's Jake Tapper wrote in a column dubbed "Dumb Chic" that "the issue of Bush's intelligence is nowhere near as prominent as Gore would like can be attributed, in part, to the media, which while mocking Bush's gaffes has analyzed the two candidates' policies as if their respective understandings of their policies were equal." A New York Times (November 1, 2000) comparison of Bush and Gore on foreign policy issues, for instance, included a chart that characterized the two candidates' positions on the half-dozen or so military involvements that PBS's Jim Lehrer asked them about during the second presidential debate in Winston-Salem. On the question of the Balkans, the New York Times failed to point out that Bush did not realize, during the presidential debates, that the Europeans in NATO were responsible for the ground forces in Kosovo. And the New York Times also never mentioned that Bush erred in his claim that all three of the men who murdered James Byrd Jr. had been sentenced to death.

Marjorie Williams, a Washington Post columnist, asked, "Is this quiet insistence on Gore's loserness a function of the media's liberalism? It could be the majority of the political press corps is made up of self-hating Democrats (like me) who are reverting to the pessimistic certainty that under the skin of successful Clintonism, they are inevitably and always the party of annoying losers."

Rick Berke of the New York Times helped the Bush bandwagon when he wrote that the Texas governor's camp was far more energized than Democrats. Berke wrote, "Republicans are united, enthusiastic, and perhaps more likely to vote, not necessarily because they think Mr. Bush is an ideal candidate but because they are determined to win back the White House after eight years, and they share a collective scorn for the Clinton administration. Moreover, enthusiasm on the Democratic side has been dampened because Democrats lack the motivation of having to take back a White House out of their party's control and are more conflicted over their standard bearer, Mr. Gore."

AN ANTIQUATED VOTING SYSTEM. The Los Angeles Times (December 11, 2000) conducted a study and concluded that Florida was not the only state that conducted a faulty election. New York City voters use metal lever-action machines so old they are no longer made, each with 27,000 parts. Similar machines in Louisiana are vulnerable to rigging with pliers, a screwdriver, a cigarette lighter, and a Q-Tip.

In Texas, "vote whores" do favors for people in return for their absentee ballots. Sometimes the canvassers or consultants, as they prefer to be called, simply buy the ballots. Failing all else, they steal them from mailboxes.

Alaska has more registered voters than voting-age people. Indiana, which encourages voting with sign-ups by mail and at driver's license bureaus, has jammed its registration lists with hundreds of thousands of people who should not be on them. They include felons, the dead and many who have registered repeatedly.

In Oregon, a preliminary survey indicates that more than 36,000 of the state's 1.5 million voters may have mailed in ballots this year that were signed by someone else. Some students in Wisconsin say they voted as many as four times.

Louisiana's former election commissioner, Jerry Fowler, pleaded guilty 14 days ago to a kickback scheme with a voting machine dealer. Even when relationships are legal, lines of authority blur. In the state of Washington, dealers program vote counters. In Arizona, they go as far as to help feed in the ballots.

Alaska had 38,209 more names on its rolls than it has voting age population. The rolls were difficult to purge because people come and go. One of every five names on the Indiana rolls was bogus, according to Aristotle International, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that helped clean up registration rolls. Indiana officials disputed the number, but most agreed it was somewhere between 10 percent and 20 percent. Aristotle representatives said that six other states had rolls with bogus names of 20 percent or higher: Arizona, Idaho, Texas, Oklahoma, Utah, and Wisconsin. Officials in those states believed that the figure was inflated, but none denied that his or her state had serious problems.

The voting system has been so troubled that the National Bureau of Standards, a federal agency now known as the National Institute of Standards and Technology, said in 1988 that an election mainstay, prescored punch-card ballots, should be junked -- but more than 500 counties throughout the nation continued to use them. Federal standards for voting equipment took effect in 1990, but they were not mandatory. A number of states, including Florida, eliminated some or all of the standards into their own codes. But all existing equipment was excepted, meaning that decades-old systems in Florida and elsewhere became exempt.

DID THE GOP ACKNOWLEDGE “SOMETHING” WENT WRONG? One and one-half years after the Supreme Court indirectly elected George W. Bush as president, the administration admitted at least something went wrong in Florida -- but not much. The Justice Department filed a suit against three Florida counties for voting-rights violations stemming from the November 2000 election.

The suit was filed by the Justice Department’s Ralph Boyd, assistant attorney general for civil rights. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that out of 11,000 complaints received after the election impasse some of them were charges of illegality but most were complaints about the outcome of the election.

None involved the chaos created by machines that could not read votes properly and resulted, according to several independent studies, in Black voters being far more likely to have their votes discarded than were whites. None involves Duval County, which included Jacksonville, where, of 27,000 votes that were thrown out, two-fifths were from just three voting districts that are predominantly Black. And none involved the alleged felons who voted.

Another suit was filed in Missouri -- the state in which Attorney General John Ashcroft just happened to have been beaten in his Senate re-election bid by a dead man, Governor Mel Carnahan.

Another legal action was filed in Tennessee, which, by coincidence, was the home state of the defeated Gore. The suit was filed by the Justice Department’s Ralph Boyd, assistant attorney general for civil rights. He told the Senate Judiciary Committee that out of 11,000 complaints received after the election impasse some of them were charges of illegality but most were complaints about the outcome of the election.

None involved the chaos created by machines that could not read votes properly and resulted, according to several independent studies, in Black voters being far more likely to have their votes discarded than were whites. None involves Duval County, which included Jacksonville, where, of 27,000 votes that were thrown out, two-fifths were from just three voting districts that are predominantly Black. And none involved the alleged felons who voted.

However, Ashcroft refused tofile lawsuits in nine cases it was investigating for possible voting rights violations. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and four other Democrats requested in a letter that Ashcroft supply them with the jurisdictions involved, the violations alleged and the reasons for closing the nine cases. (Yahoo News, May 30, 2002)