[rayiner]

WaPo did a recount many years later and found that Bush would have won with further counting. (EDIT: It was a CNN meta-analysis, not WaPo: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect...)

Gore attempted stochastic cheating in that election. There were a large number of uncountable votes because of incompletely punched out cards. That wasn’t a problem because, statistically, the errors would be randomly distributed between the candidates. But Gore requested hand recounts in only a few counties he had clearly won. The mathematical effect of that was to bias the recount in favor of finding more Gore votes. For example, if the county had gone 60% Gore, then for every 10 votes countable by hand that couldn’t be counted by machine, 6 would be Gore votes. Stochastic cheating.

There were also lots of shenanigans where precincts were adding partial recount numbers (where some precincts had finished counting and some had not) to the totals. There is a reason that the Supreme Court ruled 7-2 that Gore’s recount plan was unconstitutional. (The 5-2 part was only about the remedy.)

[tzs]

What about the butterfly ballots? The errors those likely caused would not be randomly distributed.

[rayiner]

When I say “errors” I mean votes the punchcard machines couldn’t read due to the chad not being punched out all the way. Those were the ballots that were at issue in the litigation (“undercounts”).

The butterfly ballot would have resulted in votes for Buchanan or double votes (ones for Buchanan + Gore if the person tried to go back and correct). Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?

But the whole recount thing is stupid. It’s designed by people who don’t understand statistics. Any counting is a statistical process that’s going to have some measurement error. The Florida vote was almost certainly within that margin of error. The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.

[FireBeyond]

> Gore never actually tried to get those counted in his favor. And how could you know?

Whereas of course the Bush campaign was absolutely eager to ensure every vote, including those for Gore, were verified, right?

> The correct outcome then would have been re-voting, not a recount.

I do agree with you on this, entirely. Although even if that was the plan, the state of Florida is not exactly known for making poll access easy.

[TimorousBestie]

You either misremember or misrepresent WaPo’s reporting.

> In all likelihood, George W. Bush still would have won Florida and the presidency last year if either of two limited recounts -- one requested by Al Gore, the other ordered by the Florida Supreme Court -- had been completed, according to a study commissioned by The Washington Post and other news organizations.

> But if Gore had found a way to trigger a statewide recount of all disputed ballots, or if the courts had required it, the result likely would have been different. An examination of uncounted ballots throughout Florida found enough where voter intent was clear to give Gore the narrowest of margins.

So on this basis, GP has the right of it: Gore probably won that election.

[rayiner]

I was actually thinking of a much later CNN retrospective looking at various studies: https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-elect... (“Taken as a whole, the recount studies show Bush would have most likely won the Florida statewide hand recount of all undervotes. Undervotes are ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race.”).

The studies showed that Gore only would have won if counting over votes, which his team never pursued: “The studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.”

Maybe if Gore had asked for a statewide hand recount the result would have been different. But instead he tried to stochastically cheat through selective recounts, which burned a huge amount of time on a process that was fundamentally unsound.

[ImPostingOnHN]

Maybe you're right about your theory, but based on the above investigations, he won the vote anyways.