The Greatest Horror Story

Craig Crawford:

Bush's Legacy -- A Flawed Election

The tragic course of George W. Bush's presidency began with what might have well been one of the great accidents in American history -- his flawed election. It is difficult to find a more dramatic example of why voting matters.

The Bush team learned how to cut corners in the 2000 election, avoiding a final recount of Florida's challenged ballots by going to the United States Supreme Court to stop it. ...

There were 175,000 Florida ballots that year that could not be counted by machines for various reasons. They had to be hand counted to determine what the voters intended.

...A consortium of news organizations, including national newspapers and television networks, spent months after the 2000 debacle reviewing contested ballots in an effort to find out who actually won. Once the study was completed, the organizations reached different conclusions.

Some reported that Bush would have won anyway. Others were not sure. It all depended on what standard is applied for judging a voter's intention.

One of the most troubling issues was so-called overvotes -- where it appeared that more than one candidate had been chosen. The cause of the confusion was mostly due to poorly designed ballots.

Gore would have been declared the winner under statewide rules that Florida later developed for evaluating questionable ballots. That was the conclusion of The Orlando Sentinel, one of the participants in the consortium study. But those rules were not in effect in 2000 ....

The bottom line is that more Florida voters tried to vote for Gore than voted for Bush. There is a real chance that Bush should never have become president.