1) Myth: Al Gore has a responsibility to concede the election.

Fact: A 330 vote margin out of 6 million votes cast is incredibly close! It is roughly equivalent to a 1-vote margin in a city with 50,000 people and 18,000 voters.

It is extremely rare for an election this close NOT to be contested for several weeks until a manual recount can take place, with observers from both sides taking part and inspecting ballots. This kind of detailed recount has not yet taken place.

According to the US Constitution and the Laws of Florida, it is the responsibility of officials in Florida to certify the election results. The deadline is November 17, the date when absentee ballots from overseas will be counted. In Florida, Oregon, and in New Mexico the difference between the candidates is much less than the number of absentee ballots yet to be counted, as of 11/11/2000.



2) Myth: the number of "spoiled ballots" in Palm Beach County was not unusual, given the high turnout for the 2000 election. In a press briefing televised live on all networks on 10/9/00, Karl Rove of the Bush campaign compared 14,872 invalidated ballots in the 1996 race for President to the figure of 19,120 ballots spoiled in this election.

Fact: the Bush campaign was comparing "apples and oranges". There were actually 29,702 invalidated ballots this year in Palm Beach County, almost twice the number in 1996. The 19,120 figure refers to only those ballots which were invalidated for voting for more than one candidate. An additional 10,582 ballots this year had no choice recorded for President at all. A hand inspection of these ballots would detect additional votes for all candidates. These figures can be obtained from the Palm Beach County election office (www.pbcelections.org).


3) Myth: The Palm beach ballot is definitely illegal due to the presence of punch holes to the left of some of the candidates.

Fact: Legality of the ballots is an issue that may require a judgment in court. There is a loophole in Florida law that may allow ballots used for voting machines to deviate from the rules governing paper ballots. The Florida electoral authorities or the Bush campaign may be able to demonstrate in court that the ballot was legal, as the office of the Secretary of State asserted in a press statement issued on November 10.

This does not mean that the ballot could not be ruled illegal on other grounds, including possibly the Americans With Disabilities Act.


4) Myth: Former Secretary of State James Baker, speaking on behalf of the Bush campaign at a press briefing televised by all networks on 11/10/00, said "the more often ballots are recounted, especially by hand, the more likely it is that human errors, like lost ballots and other risks, will be introduced. This frustrates the very reason why we have moved from hand counting to machine counting."

Fact: If hand counts are so inaccurate, then why, according to the Orlando Sentinel, (orlandosentinel.com) did Republican officials in Seminole County, where Bush led Gore, order that the recount be done by hand in order to get an accurate count?

There may exist voting systems which are less prone to error than hand counts, but the one in use in Florida, involving punch cards, was certainly not one of them. The problem is that if the punched-out pieces of cardboard are not completely removed from the punch card, so that light cannot pass through, those punches will not be read. Voting machines were introduced for efficiency and cost reasons, not accuracy.

Punch cards are antiquated technology. They were outlawed in Massachusetts in 1997 after the controversy involving the election of Congressman Delahunt by Secretary of State William Galvin.


5) Myth: "Palm Beach County is a Pat Buchanan stronghold and that's why Pat Buchanan received 3407 votes there. According to the Florida Department of State, 16,695 voters in Palm Beach County are registered to the Independent Party, the Reform Party, or the American Reform Party, an increase of 110% since the 1996 presidential election. Throughout the rest of Florida, the registration increase for these parties was roughly 38%." -- statement released by Ari Fleischer of the Bush Campaign, 11/9/00

Fact: the increase in registration for the Reform Party may have very little to do with support for Pat Buchanan. The reason is that prior to the Reform party primary, there were campaigns by Buchanan's opponent, John Hagelin, and prominent liberals including Rabbi Arthur Waskow in early August, to encourage people to register as Reform in order to defeat Buchanan in the national primary, which was conducted by mail-in ballot.

Even Buchanan himself admitted [on the Today Show] that many of his votes actually "belonged to Al Gore."


6) Myth: If Gore (or Bush) ends up winning the popular vote, he really should win the election even if he loses Florida and other states.

Fact: This is not the way the U.S. Constitution is written. The Electoral College decision, imperfect as it may be, is the only one that matters. It may be possible to reform or eliminate the electoral college in the future, so that small states would no longer receive extra electoral votes out of proportion to their population. But until this change is made by Constitutional amendment, the Electoral College is still the law of the land.


7) Myth: The Democrats pulled a case out of federal court because they did not like the judge to whom the case was assigned.

This statement was repeatedly presented by Republican officials on 11/10/00 without presenting any evidence as to why the case was pulled. It was not a case filed by the Democratic Party but by Florida citizens, and Florida election law is state law therefore Democrats are correct to want to see the issues examined at the state level first.


8) Myth: The election process in Florida outside of Palm Beach County was fair. According to James Baker, representing the Bush campaign on 11/10/00, "no cases of fraud have been reporting either with the general election or with the recount [this is from memory; need direct quote". Certainly there were not enough cases to affect the final outcome.

Fact: Actually, thousands of irregularities in over a half-dozen categories have already been reported:

-Ballots ran out in certain precincts according to the LA Times [11/10/00].

-Carpools of african-american voters were stopped by police, according to the Los Angeles times [11/10/00]. In some cases, officers demanded to see a "taxi license".

-Voters in line, waiting to vote when the polls closed at 7pm, were turned away. [need source for this]

-Voters were mistakenly removed from voter rolls because their names were similar to those of ex-cons. [source: Mother Jones magazine, http://www.motherjones.com/news_wire/floridavote.htm

-Many voters received pencils rather than pens when they voted, in violation of state law. [need source for this]

-According to the Miami Herald, many Haitian-American voters were turned away from precincts where they were voting for the first time [November 10, 2000]

-According to Feed Magazine (www.feedmag.com), the mayoral candidate whose election in Miami was overturned due to voter fraud, Xavier Suarez, said he was involved in preparing absentee ballots for George W. Bush. [11/9/00] source: http://www.feedmag.com/templates/daily.php3?a_id=1389

-According to tompaine.com, CBS's Dan Rather reported voting a possible computer error in Volusia County, Florida, where James Harris, a Socialist Workers Party candidate, won 9,888 votes. He won 583 in the rest of the state. [11/9/00] County-level results for Florida are available at cnn.com.


9) Myth: There are no substantiated examples of actual voter fraud.

Fact: The election was held three days ago, so of course many instances of fraud have not yet been substantiated. This is why court proceedings may be necessary. Even so, authorities have already uncovered clear evidence of voter fraud involving absentee ballots.

In Pensacola, Florida, Bush supporter Todd Vinson never received the absentee ballot he requested. According to the Associated Press on 11/9/00, it was determined after an investigation that this ballot was received by a third party, filled out with a forged signature, and then sent in. Assistant State Attorney Russell Edgar, when asked if other absentee ballots might had been intercepted, said, "I agree there may well be many more than just this one."


10) Myth: There is no legal precedent to have a revote in cases where the mistakes by election officials were unintentional.

Fact: The Florida Supreme Court ruled in 1998, in connection with a disputed Miami election, that if there is "substantial noncompliance" with election laws and a "reasonable doubt" about whether election results "expressed the will of the voters" then a judge must "void the contested election, even in the absence of fraud or intentional wrongdoing." (source: Wall St. Journal, 10/10/2000)

It is possible to hold a revote in which only those who voted the first time would have the opportunity to vote again.


11) Myth: It is undemocratic for judges to intervene after an election, especially when mistakes were made by the party trying to contest the results.

Fact: The most fundamental right of a democratic society is the right to vote, and to have one's vote correctly counted. The legal system exists to ensure that people's rights are respected.

Of course judges can be biased but that is why bad decisions can be appealed. The issue is not the affiliation or intentions of the ballot designer, but rather, whether the civil rights of voters, especially elderly voters and those with disabilities, were violated.

These issues have arisen in other states as well. In a Massachusetts Democratic primary in 1996 for the US House, the election was so close after several recounts that a judge had to make the final decision after examining some of the ballots that were incompletely punched, to determine the intention of the voter. The law clearly dictated that it was the will of the voter that mattered, and future Congressman William Delahunt went on to win the final election. You can call his office at 202-225-3121.


12) Myth: Richard Nixon's party in 1960 did the honorable thing in not contesting the results of the election.

Fact: According to a column in the Los Angeles Times, 11/10/2000, "on Nov. 11, three days after the election, Thruston B. Morton, a Kentucky senator and the Republican Party's national chairman, launched bids for recounts or investigations in not just Illinois and Texas but also Delaware, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, New Jersey, New Mexico, Nevada, Pennsylvania and South Carolina. A few days later, Robert H. Finch and Leonard W. Hall, two Nixon intimates, sent agents to conduct what they called "field checks" in eight of those 11battlegrounds. In New Jersey, local Republicans obtained court orders for recounts; Texans brought suit in federal court. Illinois witnessed the most vigorous crusade. Nixon aide Peter Flanigan encouraged the creation of a Chicago-area Nixon Recount Committee. As late as Nov. 23, Republican National Committee general counsel H. Meade Alcorn Jr. was still predicting Nixon would take Illinois." Recounts continued into December, but did not succeed in overturning the result of the election.


13) Myth: Troops overseas will vote for Bush overwhelmingly, and their votes have yet to be counted, so Gore might as well concede the election.

Fact: The number of yet-to-be-counted overseas military ballots is likely to be in the range of 500 to 2000, based on the 1996 election in which there were 2,300 oversees absentee ballots overall, with roughly 60% of them coming from people enlisted in the military. According to CNN [11/10/00], the military overseas ballots that arrived before the election were already counted.

The biggest difference 1996 is that Clinton -- who avoided the draft -- was running against Dole, a decorated military veteran.

In 2000 George W. Bush -- who avoided service in Vietnam and actually lost flying privileges in the Texas Air National Guard, possibly due to his unwillingness to take a drug test -- is running against Al Gore, a veteran who served in Vietnam.

It is just as possible that Gore will gain a few hundred votes from veterans as Bush. It is also possible that the Gore ticket will pick up votes from democratically appointed diplomats, temporary residents and dual citizens of Israel, etc.