In mid-September, a consortium of news organizations announced that it was postponing its analysis of the ballots that were cast but not counted in Florida during the mess that was the 2000 presidential election. The decision didn’t sit well with those who were eagerly awaiting proof that George W. Bush had stolen the election. Word quickly traveled the Internet that Al Gore had won and won big, and that the media had spiked the story to avoid undermining the legitimacy of a suddenly popular president who was leading the nation to war.
A few weeks later, still-indignant Gore supporters found some small consolation in the idea that even if every vote didn’t count every vote would at least get counted. In early January, eight media organizations–including the New York Times, the Tribune Company, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post–hired the National Opinion Research Center to examine the ballots that had been disqualified in all 67 counties in Florida. NORC, a nonpartisan company associated with the University of Chicago, specializes in data collection and analysis.
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At the beginning of October, one of her contributors submitted an article asserting that the NORC study showed Gore had “decisively” won Florida. It quoted an anonymous former media executive who had “previously established credibility as a well-informed and accurate conduit of information.” Kay knows next to nothing about the writer, David Podvin, not even such basic things as where he lives and what he does for a living. But she respects and trusts him nonetheless. Podvin had previously published a piece on BuzzFlash.com, another Chicago-based Web site, debunking the widely reported story that Clinton staffers had vandalized the White House in their waning days on the job. The General Accounting Office later reported to Congress that there were no records of vandalism, and the General Services Administration described the condition of the property as “consistent with what we would expect to encounter when tenants vacate office space after an extended occupancy.” When Podvin told Kay one of his main sources on the recount story was the same media executive he’d talked to for the vandalism story, she was thrilled. “I said, ‘Holy shit!’ I knew it was a biggie.” (Attempts to reach Podvin were unsuccessful. Kay says he didn’t want to be interviewed for this article.)
NORC’s assertion that no one could have known who won the election during the ballot examination process is “absurd,” Kay says–especially in the face of the interviews she and Podvin conducted with observers, coders, supervisors, and people in the “upper echelons” of the mainstream media. Kay claims that even Republican observers detected a pro-Gore trend, and that’s why, according to an article she penned with Podvin, they “yelled about the quality of the coders, screamed about the treachery of the process, and threw temper tantrums about the unfairness of it all.” The article asserted that one GOP activist even wrongly accused a coder of being drunk on the job.
A day before the results were made public, the St. Petersburg Times reported that it had received more than 3,000 messages from a coordinated campaign. Kay sent the excerpt out to people on her mailing list, writing underneath it in bold bracketed letters, “Thats US, folks!…We can be really, really proud!”
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Nathan Mandell; National Opinion Research Center, University of Chicago.
