Please recheck those facts
The FL SC decision would have done the recount under the direction of district judge Terry Lewis. In interviews afterwards, which are backed up by documentation at the time, Terry Lewis claims that he would have counted both overvotes and undervotes. If he had done that, then Gore would have won.
That was a significant oversight on the part of the newspaper articles which claimed that, had the recount gone forward as planned, Bush would have still won. They were mistaken about what was actually planned.
You would have known this if you had read the link that I provided. In fact I suspect that you did know part of this based on how precisely you stated your claim.
Now your claim of 8000 votes being case that should not have been cast is kind of interesting. Let's review, shall we? There were 57,700 "ex-felons" on the list. The one county that checked each of the 694 names on its local list could verify only 34 as actual felony convicts. Which suggests that about 95% of the people on the list should not have been. If that rate held for the rest of the list, then that list had fewer than 3000 real felons on it. Not all of whom would have voted. (Probably about half.)
So where did your 8000 votes that should not have been cast come from? Were they 8000 people who you're counting as guilty because they were on that scrub list? (A scrub list which Florida was successfully sued about.) If the rate remained at the dismal success that it had when spot checked, only 400 people "wrongly" voted (in many states they would have had the right to vote, but I digress). 400 excess votes hardly offsets tens of thousands of people wrongly denied the vote. Tens of thousands of people who are disproportionately black and therefore disproportionately Democratic.
While I agree that the excess votes offsets the excess scrubs, the relative magnitudes of the numbers makes the offsetting pretty negligable.
As for your comments about a "farreaching conspiracy", nice ad hominem. No wild-eyed accusations are being made. The claim is not that Bush planned on Florida being the key, it is that Florida was a mess and Florida was the mess that was looked at in the most detail. Both parties attempt to manipulate the system. The Democrats are hardly clean (in fact seeing a Daley lecture on fair voting was one of the best ironies in 2000). However in recent the Republicans have been willing to get a lot dirtier than the Democrats, with an unfortunate amount of success.
No, they didn't just manipulate Florida. Several other states had messes in 2000 as well, Florida is just the one that got a spectacular amount of press due to a perfect combination of issues. For instance when I pointed out the (successful) attempt to systematically manipulate ballot spoilage to the advantage of the Republicans, the estimate that I have seen is 200,000 black votes lost in Florida. But that wasn't just happening in Florida, nationwide that manipulation is estimated at 2,000,000 votes.
Now let me cut you off before you jump up and down and say that I'm claiming a Republican conspiracy. In fact I am claiming a Republican conspiracy. The question is whether I'm claiming an unreasonable conspiracy. I submit that any fair look at the history of US elections (yes, including Chicago in 1960) will show that the kind of manipulations that I am talking about are hardly unprecedented. We have a two party system, and whichever party is in power attempts to maintain that power. They do it by changing rules, bending rules, breaking rules, selectively enforcing rules..you name it, they've done it. Both sides.
But it is something that the American people as a whole have historically had little sympathy for. Our collective unwillingness to accept "political manipulation as usual" is the biggest check out there on attempts to manipulate politics. When it comes to that question, I know what side I'm for. I'd hope that somewhere deep inside you feel the same way.
Cheers,
Ben
