11/21/00 9:25 a.m.
The Heist of All Time
The political crime of U.S. history.

By William P. Kucewicz, editor of GeoInvestor.com

How sweet a thing it is to wear a crown.
— Henry VI, Part III, Act I. ii

et's not mince words: The Democrats are trying to steal the presidential election — and are brazenly asking Florida's highest court to sanction the larceny.

If Al Gore and his cronies succeed, we will have witnessed the greatest political crime not just of our time but in all of U.S. history. The Florida fraud already eclipses the Lewinsky affair and Watergate. A Gore ascension to the presidency would indeed outrank even the assassinations of Abraham Lincoln, James Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy as the supreme insult to our democratic republic.

The assassins gained nothing personally from their crimes and ultimately paid for them with their lives. If Gore succeeds, however, he not only would have thwarted the will of the American people but also would have personally benefited, securing the highest office in the land through the manipulation and corruption of the election process. It's a political crime more worthy of a banana republic or a totalitarian state than the oldest constitutional democracy in history.

Like any good deception, the masterminds of Gore's coup attempt, as well as its many apologists, have tried to disguise their treachery, garbing their scheme in the language of democracy: "full and fair," "the intent of the voter" and "the will of the people." Despite their best efforts, though, the motive remains clear: To win an election that Gore has already lost.

As of noon Saturday, with the tally of Florida's overseas ballots, George W. Bush became, de facto, president-elect, with a margin of victory in Florida of 930 votes. Only the Supreme Court of Florida's unsolicited injunction against the Secretary of State blocked Bush's victory from being proclaimed.

The continuing Gore effort to overturn the election result, with ballot counters using their psychic powers to divine voter intent in three pro-Gore counties in Florida, leaves Democrats untrue even to their very name. Worse, few see the deception for what it really is — a usurpation of the one-man-one-vote election process by gaming the system to elbow Gore's way into the White House.

Consider the five key parts of the Democrats' strategy for victory: 1) recount paper ballots only in pro-Gore counties to tilt the statewide vote; 2) redefine the rules used to determine what constitutes a legal vote; 3) pressure Democratic officials in two counties to resurrect previously abandoned recounts; 4) sue to disqualify absentee ballots mailed in by Republicans in another county, and 5) systematically disqualify overseas ballots expected to favor Bush.

Selective recounting: Gore strategists were quick to identify those counties where a subjective recount of the ballots could hand their man a victory. At first, the complaint was about the now famous "butterfly ballot," which may have caused some voters to miscast their choice for president. Gore's people, however, knew that they couldn't win the election on that basis, so they broadened their assault to encompass ballots rejected by counting machines in pro-Gore areas.

The three counties selected were Miami-Dade, the state's largest county, where Gore won 53% of the vote to Bush's 46%, Palm Beach, where Gore garnered 62% to Bush's 35%, and Broward, which gave Gore 67% of the vote to 31% for Bush. The three counties combined represent 27% of all the votes tallied in the state, and they account for 33% of all the votes awarded to Gore in Florida. By contrast, only 21% of Bush's votes came from these three counties.

Appreciate that paper ballots read by machine are inherently subject to a margin of error. This is acceptable, through, because it doesn't affect the outcome of a race, so long as the errors are random and the overall vote is large enough to balance out the mistakes. In Florida, about two-thirds of the state's six million ballots were machine-counted paper ballots. An expected error rate of around 0.1% likely affected less than 4,000 of the four million or so paper ballots, and the rejected votes would have been evenly distributed among all the candidates on the ballot.

In other words, absent any errors, Bush still would have won Florida. The same, however, can't be said of hand counting, especially when a great deal of subjective judgment is permitted. Allowing canvassing officials — eight of nine of whom in Broward, Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties are Democrats — to use any telltale mark to determine a voter's intent introduces such a large margin of error that it can actually skew the election result. Machines, even with their known error rates, provide for truer percentage tallies than subjective hand counts by political partisans.

Moreover, manual recounting in only pro-Gore counties prejudices Florida's overall election result by effectively diluting the vote in the parts of Florida where recounts aren't being performed. This occurs because hand recounts reduce the percentage of rejected ballots. In areas where rejected ballots aren't subsequently eyeballed, the rate of rejection is higher. This tilts the total election result by including in the state tally a higher percentage of ballots from those counties where manual recounts take place than from those that didn't conduct hand recounts.

In this year's election, the three recounting counties account for 41% of all the paper ballots used in Florida and 27% of all the votes cast in the state. This means that 59% of the state's paper ballots aren't being recounted, and these ballots represent 39% of all votes cast statewide. If the limited recounts are ultimately accepted, it will mean that about 3 in 10 Floridians would have won greater representation in the statewide tally, while 4 in 10 would have seen their votes diluted. Simply equity dictates that selective hand counts are unjust. In addition, they violate the equal protection and due process clauses of the U.S. Constitution.

In mounting a defense, Democrats are wont to cite Gore's seemingly magnanimous offer to have all of Florida's ballots recounted. Gore's gesture, however, was both disingenuous and deceitful. It was based on the false premise that a statewide recount, short of a court order, could be carried out at that late date. The vice president knew full well that the deadlines for requesting recounts had already passed in most of the state. Therefore, to ask Bush to enter into such an agreement would accomplish nothing other than to undermine the GOP's own legal argument in challenging the recounts already underway in southeast Florida.

Redefining the rules: When Gore's minions realized that even a hand recount might not garner the votes he needed, they opted to change the rules. Suddenly, dimpled cards and so-called pregnant chad were deemed sufficient to indicate a voter's intention. The rule changes, however, fly in the face of two previous court decisions, which ruled that recounts are only valid if based on existing and defined directions on how votes are to be adjudged. Redefining the rules as ballots are being counted thus defies legal precedent and is wholly irregular and unjustified.

Political pressure: After due consideration and even sample recounts, Broward and Miami-Dade officials (all of whom are Democrats) rejected proposals for countrywide recounts. Then, Democrats threatened to sue, and the officials acquiesced. Once again, the inherent margins of machine error showed that a recount wouldn't change the overall percentage outcome. However, by employing more subjectivity in the recount, Democrats saw that Broward and Miami-Dade might supply just enough Gore votes to give the Vice President a statewide victory.

Select disqualifications: In DeLand, Fla., Seminole County Democrats have been in court seeking to have 4,700 absentee ballots thrown out. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Democrats claimed the county's elections supervisor incorrectly let Republicans alter the signed absentee ballot request forms by inserting voter identification numbers. Note that the challenge involves only the forms requesting absentee ballots and not the ballots themselves. Moreover, the redress the Democrats seek is the disenfranchisement of voters who personally did nothing untoward.

Systematic disqualifications: Mark Herron, a Tallahassee lawyer shepherding Democratic presidential election lawsuits through the local courts, sent a five-page memo to Democratic attorneys throughout Florida on Nov. 15, giving them tips on how to lodge protests against overseas ballots. Michael Jones, executive director of Republicans Abroad, told CNN's Larry King, "This is an orchestrated effort on behalf of Al Gore, because he sees the votes going for George W. Bush abroad."

While the ploy succeeded in getting more than 1,400 overseas ballots rejected, it backfired in the court of public opinion, because a majority (an estimated 900 to 1,100) of the disqualified ballots came from military personnel based abroad. Indeed, Herron's memo specifically cited "military overseas ballots" as candidates for rejection. The public nationwide has been outraged by the unseemly tactic of disenfranchising the many men and women in the armed services who, for love of country, have placed themselves in harm's way.

Power's seductive allure helps explain the Democrats' zeal in attempting to steal the presidential election of 2000. The love of power has long brought out the worst of human nature. What's more, Democrats are aghast at the prospect of the White House and Congress being run by Republicans for the first time in 46 years. So, through manipulation of Florida's election process, Democrats are attempting to rig the outcome of the Nov. 7 ballot and hand Gore the presidency.

The next big issue may become whether Americans will turn a blind eye to an ill-gotten victory. Moral relativism became the norm in U.S. politics under the Clinton administration. In the Clinton White House, as David Gergen has said, truth became whatever could be sold to a gullible journalist. It was the hope of many Americans that the November presidential election would rid the nation of this ethical scourge.

Depending on what the courts have to say, we may soon find that the post-election response of the American people and their congressional representatives in Washington will become the most important test of the mettle of the United States since the Civil War.