President Al?

Nearly five years after the fact, Democrats are still fighting over the 2000 election. Eric Alterman says:

Really, it’s not controversial at all, unless facts have no meaning. The only counting method through which Gore would have lost was the one his profoundly incompetent legal team happened to choose to argue, not that it mattered. The media seized upon this coincidence to try to protect Bush’s legitimacy. But the fact his, Gore won Florida by any sensible standard.

What Alterman means is that, had the Gore team managed to convince the courts that "overcounts" counted, then Gore would have won. This is based on a count of all of the overcount ballots. Not mentioned is that at least some of these were probably "Gore/Nader" votes. Of the rest, some probably meant to show that they REALLY wanted to vote for Gore and some probobly hoped that their votes would be counted twice. Either way, this is traditionally a bad ballot so it would have taken a lot of talking to convince the courts to allow them.

Mickey Klaus has more detail on this but ignores the problems of getting the courts to accept overcounts.

Paul Krugman mentions:

Two different news media consortiums reviewed Florida's ballots; both found that a full manual recount would have given the election to Mr. Gore. This was true despite a host of efforts by state and local officials to suppress likely Gore votes, most notably Ms. Harris's "felon purge," which disenfranchised large numbers of valid voters.

In fact there were complaints about the purge before the election and the most populous counties ignored it, allowing felons to vote. This one cuts both ways.

Regardless, this is exactly what Republicans were afraid Gore was going to do during the recount - keep counting until he found a way to come out ahead and insist that this is the only valid measure. In an election this close there was bound to be some way that Gore could win, it's just one that everyone at the time felt should not count.

More on voting here.

Even more here.

Krugman's second scenario relates to what the consortia studies found by reviewing overvotes (double or triple votes or multiple marked ballots ). Here Krugman overstates the results for Gore. Some of the scenarios did show Gore winning when overvotes were reexamined. And some of them showed him losing. Krugman says the consideration of the overvotes (what he calls a full manual recount, and which he believes should have occurred) would have produced a tiny Gore victory. Gore does win in a few of the varoius overvote scenarios which were examined, but not all of them. While not directly misstating the truth, Krugman misleads his readers by creating the impression that if overvotes are considered Gore would have been the clear winner

Again Krugman shows no care for nuance, if he can find any kernel of a fact he likes. Remember again, that nobody – not Bush, not Gore, not any court in Florida – ever requested a recount of the overvote, so who cares what it shows? I challenge Krugman to find for me the states that manually recount overvotes in close elections