The Democratic National Committee has claimed that former Vice President Al Gore was the true winner in the hotly contested five-week Florida race following the Nov. 7 election by a 721-vote margin.
In a press release dated Feb. 16, the DNC said President George W. Bush’s “old Florida vote total” that put him officially ahead of Gore by 537 votes has been negated by “independent” counts conducted by two newspapers — the Orlando Sentinel and the Palm Beach Post.
“New evidence continues to roll in that Al Gore did, in fact, carry the state of Florida in the presidential election. In the Orlando Sentinel’s examination of discarded ballots in 16 counties, Al Gore picked up 569 votes, enough to erase the 537 vote margin Bush claimed to have in Florida,” the DNC said, quoting a Sentinel story published Feb. 10.
Then, on Feb. 15, the Sentinel — as quoted by the DNC — published a story saying that a “review of undervote ballots in Seminole County, a Republican stronghold, found that a hand recount of the ballots would have yielded an additional 13 votes for Gore.”
Then, “a Palm Beach Post examination of disputed ballots in Palm Beach County found that Gore would have picked up 676 additional votes if dimpled ballots had been counted as votes,” the DNC said in its press statement.
“The gain for Gore would have been added to a 174-vote gain for Gore found during the county’s hand recount that was not allowed into Florida’s official tally,” the DNC said, a phenomenon the party blamed on Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, who is a Republican.
“The numbers don’t lie: Al Gore carried Florida and won the 2000 election,” said DNC Chairman Terry McAuliffe. “It’s too bad that Bush was so afraid of counting the votes that the press had to do it. Bush should keep these numbers in mind as he pushes his radical right-wing agenda.”
Ironically, McAuliffe — who was just named to head the DNC earlier this month — “predicted” that recount tallies would indicate a Gore victory.
In a Feb. 3 appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” McAuliffe — when asked if Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., would seek the presidency on the Democratic ticket in 2004 — said: “Two, three, four weeks from today, it will be clear that Al Gore won the state of Florida. … He certainly has a right to argue that he will be the front-runner, you bet.”
Critics of McAuliffe have wondered aloud how the new DNC chief might have known that.
In a column penned for WND, Editor and founder Joseph Farah wrote: “Now, ask yourself, why will it be clear to us two, three, four weeks from now that Al Gore won Florida? What do Terry McAuliffe and the Democrats have up their sleeve? Does this statement not strongly suggest that the leadership of the Democrats plan to continue to attack the legitimacy of the presidential election for the next four years?”
“If anyone ‘tampered’ with the 2000 election — or attempted to — it was the Clinton-Gore-McAuliffe team,” Farah wrote. “Their overtly illegal activities date back not only to that campaign, but to 1996 and 1992. This is the political team that took money from China, that broke every campaign finance law known to man, that registered illegal voters and worked hard to disqualify military votes.”
In fact, hundreds of military absentee ballots –- traditionally considered to be at least 2-to-1 Republican — were thrown out in Florida. And although Democratic vice presidential candidate Joseph Lieberman argued on national television for their reinstatement — and though it took a federal judge to intervene on behalf of the absentee voters –- many of them were never ultimately counted in Election 2000.
As for McAuliffe, he has been charged by critics with engaging in illegal or, at a minimum, questionable campaign fund-raising practices on behalf of Clinton. However, he has never been formally charged with illegal campaign finance practices.
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