Your assignement for this evening

Print this out, copy it, and forcefeed it to the first idiot to brays about a "stolen election" or "selected not elected".

The Commission's report failed to note that elections in Florida are the responsibility of 67 county supervisors of election. And, in all but one of the 25 counties with the highest ballot spoilage rates, the election was supervised by a Democrat-the one exception being an official with no party affiliation. In fact, most of the authority over elections in Florida resides with officials in the state's 67 counties, and all of those with the highest rates of voter error were under Democratic control.

Of the 25 Florida counties with the highest rate of vote spoilage, in how many was the election supervised by a Republican? The answer is zero. All but one of the 25 had Democratic chief election officers, and the one exception was in the hands of an official with no party affiliation.

The majority report argues that much of the spoiled ballot problem was due to voting technology. But elected Democratic Party officials decided on the type of machinery used, including the optical scanning system in Gadsden County, the state's only majority-black county and the one with the highest spoilage rate.

So much for the Vast Right Wing Conspieracy disenfranchising voters. Kinda hard to toss out ballots when you're not in charge of doing the tossing out!

Both the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post "hardly bastions of Republicanism" as Harris has pointed out found that, if anything, county officials were too permissive in whom they let vote, and this largely was to the benefit of Al Gore.

In November 2001, a ballot-by-ballot analysis by a consortium of newspapers (the media consortium included The Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, The Palm Beach Post and CNN. The group hired the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago in January to examine the ballots) shows that Bush would have won the election clean if he'd let Florida go ahead with the partial recount that Gore wanted.

Wham, bam, thank you very much. Found via The Rott.