Informed Speculation

Mickey Kaus, whose work I greatly admire, comes to the rescue of Paul Krugman, whose work I greatly dislike. Specifically, Kaus argues that Krugman is correct to say that Al Gore would have won the election without the Supreme Court’s intervention. Sorry, Mickey, it doesn’t wash.

Kaus bases his defense on the fact that one of the studies focused on several scenarios, including the inclusion of overvotes, and concludes:

The discomfiting truth is that, if you also recounted overvotes, the NORC media recount, under several “certainty” standards, showed Gore the winner.

Yes, well, let’s look at Krugman’s article again, shall we?

There was at least as much electoral malfeasance in 2004 as there was in 2000, even if it didn’t change the outcome. And the next election may be worse.

In his recent book “Steal This Vote” – a very judicious work, despite its title – Andrew Gumbel, a U.S. correspondent for the British newspaper The Independent, provides the best overview I’ve seen of the 2000 Florida vote. And he documents the simple truth: “Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election.”

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.

It’s that phrase, full manual recount, that forms the basis of the assertion that Krugman is correct.

Well, then, under the most weaselly, lawyer-like interpretation, yes, both studies found that there existed scenario(s) that might have given the state to Gore. Both studies, however, concluded that under the most likely scenarios, the election would have still gone Bush’s way (and notice that any such nuances are absent from Krugman’s bold assertion that “Al Gore won the 2000 presidential election”.) For example, the Miami Herald and USA Today study:

…assumed counts already completed when the court-ordered recount was stopped would have been included in any official count. Thus, they allowed numbers from seven counties — Palm Beach, Volusia, Broward, Hamilton, Manatee, Escambia and Madison — to stand, but applied the most inclusive standards to votes in the rest of the state. If those numbers did not stand, the Herald reported, a more generous hypothetical revisited recount would have scored the White House for Gore — but with only a 393-vote margin.

Under most other scenarios, the papers reported, Bush would have retained his lead.

Similarly, we find this result from the National Opinion Research Center study:

Suppose that Gore got what he originally wanted — a hand recount in heavily Democratic Broward, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade and Volusia counties. The study indicates that Gore would have picked up some additional support but still would have lost the election — by a 225-vote margin statewide.

Not only does Krugman ignore these little nuances, but he suggests, in his own words, ‘electoral malfeasance’. All of this discussion (and also Kaus’s ace in the hole, a memo suggesting that the overvotes might very well have been counted, along with some generally conforming statements to the press by the judge presiding over the recount) has to do with people who, to be completely blunt, cast invalid ballots. Simply put, it’s not that difficult to read and mark a ballot, and if people were confused, they should have asked the election workers; this is not a sign of electoral malfeasance, but of voter incompetence. All this talk about ‘the intent of the voter’ masks the concept that the voter is obligated to cast a valid vote in order to have it counted.

Yet Krugman has no time for any of these niceties; no, his whole point was that Bush somehow ’stole’ the last two elections, not that a large number of people are too ignorant to mark a ballot correctly. Clearly, the preponderance of the evidence is against him.

UPDATE 4:20 p.m. central: Many thanks to Betsy Newmark, who has the sweet gig of guest blogging for Michelle Malkin, for the link…