" Various consortia of leading national and Florida newspapers are examining scores of thousands of disputed and/or uncounted ballots. It will be many weeks before the results of these tabulations are known. And it is theoretically possible that they will validate Bush's victory, just as it is theoretically possible that, on account of random Brownian motion, all the molecules of air in one of the counting rooms will rush to a corner and the counters will be asphyxiated. But it's not likely. What is likely is that the independent counts will demonstrate that, no matter what standard is used, Florida, and therefore the presidency, was unjustly awarded."
That was Hendrik Hertzberg, in the January 15 New Yorker, propounding what was only recently an unchallenged gospel for card-carrying Democratic journallectuals. Trouble is, two of the leading Florida newspapers they were counting on have since completed independent reviews of those 10,644 famously "uncounted" ballots in Miami-Dade County, and both publications have concluded that the presidency wasn't unjustly awarded.
Last month, the Palm Beach Post reported that its analysis of the disputed Miami ballots suggested George W. Bush deserved a net gain of 6 votes. And last week, the Miami Herald reported that its own review -- employing even the loosest standards of dimple interpretation -- indicated that Bush could at most have lost just 49 votes overall had the recounts Al Gore demanded been allowed to proceed. Neither paper's Miami numbers, added to Gore-favorable recount results in Broward and Palm Beach counties, the other two jurisdictions subject to litigation, are large enough to have altered the election's official result.
Does this matter? THE SCRAPBOOK doesn't think so. THE SCRAPBOOK thinks the ballots in question weren't legally cast; that Bush therefore won the election on Election Day; and that subsequent newspaper investigations are mere navel-gazing. But such hot-faced pro-Gore scribblers as Hendrik Hertzberg never agreed with us about that, and so we would expect them now to take the Palm Beach Post and Miami Herald very seriously. Perhaps, when all those molecules of air properly arrange themselves through "random Brownian motion," the scribblers will finally admit they were wrong.