Who here remembers Bush v. Gore? Who remembers the Brooks Brothers Riot to stop counting the vote?

[Jeebo]

60. Wanna hear my conspiracy theory?

Except I don't believe it is a conspiracy theory. I believe it's what really happened.

During the post-election media recount, the results of which were reported in the aftermath of 9/11, there was one Washington Post reporter who noted an interesting anomaly about the Florida vote. There were several different kinds of overvote ballots in Florida, votes for Gore and somebody else, for Bush and somebody else, for somebody else and some else, but it was the Bush/Gore overvote ballots that had something odd about them. The Washington Post reporter (can't remember his name) said that they were ALL in punch-card counties. That is, the counties where you punched a hole in a card, as opposed to the counties where you filled in an oval with a felt-tip pen. The overall number of Bush/Gore overvote ballots in the state was anomalously high too, but what was TRULY suspicious was the fact that they were ALL in punch-card counties.

What could produce this odd result? I started thinking back on election night, when while watching election returns on TV I kept noticing that there were a lot of ballots in those south Florida counties that were not being counted until very late, in the wee hours. And those were punch-card counties. And then I read online an article by a reporter for an Arizona newspaper named Sharman Braff who observed that if you wanted to fix a lot of ballots late on election night after you were able to discern just how many it would take to ensure that your candidate won, what would be the most efficient way to accomplish that? You could stack up two or three dozen punch-cards at a time and mass-punch them through the Bush hole. That would produce a lot of Bush/Gore overvote ballots, while leaving the Bush ballots as unchanged Bush ballots. To fix a lot of ballots in the felt-tip oval counties, you would have to alter them one ballot at a time, very time-consuming, not easy to change a lot of votes in a big hurry.

So Bush officially "won" Florida by 537 votes.

I truly and honestly believe this is what happened in those south Florida counties in the wee hours after midnight on election night 2000. I remember Braff said that over the Thanksgiving dinner table, members of the Bush family were angry at Jeb Bush and Katharine Harris that they let it get so uncomfortably close.

Two problems with my conspiracy theory: I am reporting this through the haze of quarter-century-old memories, and it depends on information that I received from only one person, which I admit does make it suspect. Nevertheless, I believe and have believed ever since then and will always believe that this is what happened. I keep hoping that somebody who participated in this nastiness will make a deathbed confession and reveal it all.

-- Ron

P.S. -- Don't have the time now, but late tonight when I have a little time I'm going to see if I can Google-search that Sharman Braff article. The online article I read included a headline or subhead that said something about "Katharine Harris with tweezers".