Andrew Gumbel Talks Turkey About The Election
Okay, you can stop tapping your ruby-red slippers together. Listen to Andrew:
Okay, deep breath, and repeat after me: George Bush won the election. George Bush won fair and square. He won in Ohio. He won in Florida. And he carried the national popular vote by a margin of well over three million. He may be a bum, a bozo, a corporate shill, a reckless bomb-thrower or any of the other things his opponents like to call him, but the brute fact is that he’s the guy a clear majority of voters picked to lead the free(-ish) world for the next four years.It might seem eccentric to have to insist on this point more than three weeks after John Kerry’s crystal-clear concession. But I keep having conversations with otherwise reasonable, intelligent people who are unshakable in their belief that the election was stolen. Some believe the fraud will come to light as soon as journalists like myself get off our rear ends and start digging. Others believe the evidence is already available for those with eyes to see it, and seem incredulous that I refuse to join their number.
Here’s what I tell them. Yes, there are ample grounds to question whether this election was conducted according to international standards of transparency and fairness. Yes, there are questions concerning just about every aspect of the vote, from registration to absentee procedures to provisional balloting to polling-station access to the reliability of the voting machines and the accuracy of the final count.
Precisely because of those concerns, however, it is essential to work on the basis of real evidence and real numbers, not wishful thinking. And the real evidence, to date, indicates that Bush won by too wide a margin for any of the irregularities to make a difference to the outcome.
But but but, my friends and e-mail correspondents counter, how can the exit polls have got it so wrong? How come the variance in the actual results consistently favored Bush, never Kerry? What about the Florida counties with high Democratic registration which were recorded voting overwhelmingly for Bush? What about all the uncounted punchcard votes and provisional ballots in Ohio?
Unfortunately, many of these questions are based on published reports that are wild, grossly irresponsible and, in many cases, flat wrong. Take Greg Palast’s assertion, days after the election, that Kerry won Ohio and therefore the presidency, because the uncounted ballots were more than enough to overcome his 136,000-vote deficit. Palast had absolutely no basis for knowing how the uncounted votes might pan out, and his arithmetic made assumptions about the levels of hidden support for Kerry that simply did not withstand serious analysis. (Salon’s Farhad Manjoo has done a particularly good job of demolishing his numbers.)
Or take Thom Hartmann’s piece on the Common Dreams website alerting the world to the Democrat-registered Florida counties which voted for Bush. He and his source, a mathematician called Kathy Dopp, said the tabulation of these optically scanned votes was so out of line it must have fallen victim to partisan hacking, starting as early as 2002. Clearly, Hartmann and Dopp were unaware that these counties were part of the redneck Solid South which long since started switching allegiance from Democrat to Republican. And they didn’t bother to check that every one of them voted for Bush over Gore in 2000.
Concerns about the transparency and reliability of touch-screen machines existed long before election day, and yet it seems the Berkeley research about Florida is panned as yet another crazy conspiracy cuckoo.
Yes indeed, Karl Rove did win the election.
viktor at November 25, 2004 3:26 PM
I get the feeling Viktor doesn't quite agree with Mr. Gumbel. I liked the premise that wishful thinking clouds the minds of even the most otherwise intelligent amongst us. Well said.
allan at November 25, 2004 6:58 PM