Explaining The Bush Cocoon

Under traditional news judgment, the lead paragraph in American newspapers on the morning of Nov. 12, 2001, should have read something like: “If all legally cast votes in Florida were counted in Election 2000, Democrat Al Gore would have carried the state and thus won the White House, according to an unofficial tally of disputed ballots.”

Indeed, the tally found that Gore would have carried Florida’s key electoral votes regardless of the standard used for judging so-called “undervotes,” ballots kicked out by vote-counting machines which could detect no presidential choice. Gore won even ignoring Florida’s other irregularities – such as the badly designed “butterfly ballots” and the improper “felon purges” – that cost him thousands of additional votes.

To put it more starkly, a recount conducted by a consortium of major media organizations had determined that George W. Bush, the guy in the White House, not only lost the national popular vote but should have lost the Electoral College, too. To be even blunter, a pivotal U.S. presidential election had been stolen.