If you watch that HBO movie, Recount, you might want to read this review in Salon as a kind of companion piece. It's a pretty perceptive (I think) piece of writing, and it notes which of the participants, among those depicted in the film, have objected to the portrait and which have endorsed. James Baker, who led the fight for the Bush camp, is said to be quite happy.
Several folks who've written me about my remarks have not "gotten" that my view of the whole mess is that I don't see any reason to trust any of the vote counts or recounts…and I think it's especially self-deceptive to point to the scenario that proves your guy won. All were flawed. There's one whole set of questions about people who were qualified to vote and were not allowed to do so. That alone would cast unacceptable doubts over the process even if we had an inarguable tally of how those who did vote voted. As it turns out, we don't even have that. Every count and recount (including the half-assed job done later by a press consortium) yielded a different total, in part because each time through, different ballots were being read or discarded…or in the case of recounts, simply not recounted at all.
I think the process was flawed in a dozen different ways, ranging from unreliable machines to widely different interpretations of the rules in different counties and even on recounts within the same county. The end result was many sets of totals…and no dispassionate reason to accept one as any better than another. So it came down to a matter of which side could argue/bully the acceptance of the numbers more favorable to their guy. Republicans were more aggressive, plus they had more officials (like Katharine Harris and various judges and Supreme Court Justices) in place so they were able to ram through their version of how the mess should be regarded.
George W. Bush might have actually gotten more votes than Al Gore. That's quite possible since the election in Florida does seem to have been quite close. But I don't think those ballots were ever counted honestly and I think it's outrageous, and contrary to everything we like to believe about America, that we don't have elections where the loser can walk away, satisfied the final score was legitimate. When I said this to a friend who was delighted to not have Gore in the job, he came back with the old, insulting "Get over it" line. I don't think any of us should "get over" believing that we should expect our votes to be tabulated with at least the same level of accuracy that PayPal applies to my eBay purchases.