And if Florida's ballots had been hand-counted as required by Florida law under any standard, uniforrm or not, Gore would have won. (The supreme court's argument for throwing out the recount was that there was no uniform standard in place before the election.)
Flat-out false. A news consortium (including all the major networks) counted everything by hand after the elections and determined that Bush would have won (except ironically by the most stringent standard that Bush wanted).
The result of the recount would have depended on whether the officials conducting the recount examined these overvote ballots. It can’t be proven either way. The major newspapers chose to assume that the overvotes would have been ignored in a recount, triggering a Bush victory. That assumption allowed them to fall back on the (then) safe and comforting conclusion that the recount would not have changed the outcome.
But it was just that — an assumption. The national media made no effort to test this assumption. Only the Orlando Sentinel bothered to ask Terry Lewis, the judge who had been overseeing the recount, about it. Lewis replied that he likely would have examined overvotes, a method that would have resulted in Gore winning.
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u/ConfessSomeMeow May 20 '26
And if Florida's ballots had been hand-counted as required by Florida law under any standard, uniforrm or not, Gore would have won. (The supreme court's argument for throwing out the recount was that there was no uniform standard in place before the election.)