Over in The New York Times, they've published what some are terming an important article about the vote counting in Florida. The new configuration of the Times website makes it difficult to link to a piece and, anyway, there are several related articles there so you really ought to go there and look around yourself…but do so by 7/22 because that's when the articles are a week old and they start charging to read them. Here's a link to the Reuters summary of it but I'll also give you mine…
It's that when it came time to count the absentee ballots, both Republicans and Democrats made rabid and hypocritical attempts to get some ballots counted and others disqualified, based on projections of which ballots would help or hurt their guy. The attempts were hypocritical because (a) both sides were claiming in public posturings that they wanted every possible vote counted when they clearly didn't and (b) both sides wound up arguing one set of legal principles in one venue to try and get certain ballots counted and the opposite of those principles elsewhere to try and get other ballots tossed. The Republicans were more successful, possibly because they were smarter and/or more aggressive…and had, in Katherine Harris, certain home court advantages. They got a lot of ballots accepted that, under a strict application of law, would not have counted.
The Times says that, even if all the questionable ballots had been tossed, Bush probably would have won…so the main impact of this story is to rebut Republican claims that (only) the Gore forces tried to get ballots thrown away. And I guess it also makes the whole Florida vote count look even more like something conducted in a Banana Republic. Since all but the most fiercely-partisan "spinners" already believed that the vote count was slipshod and that both the Bush and Gore forces did everything possible to avoid an honest count, none of this is news.
Still to come, any year now, are the results of the Big Press Recount. Since nothing's leaking and no one's rushing to announce what the consortium of newspapers found in examining the ballots, my guess is that the outcome will be ambiguous. It'll say that Gore would have won, had certain precincts been recounted. It'll say that a lot of votes that were reported as recounted were never actually recounted and it will point to some stash of ballots somewhere that were never counted even once but would not have put Gore in the White House, had they been. Most of all, it will show that the voting and counting were even more error-prone than anyone previously thought, and that the outcome had even more to do with after-Election Day legal maneuvering than with how many people wanted either guy. And, of course, the Supreme Court's mantra about "equal protection" will look even more misapplied than it already does.