GORE WON UNDER THIS STANDARD

From a harrowing article in today's NYT, note the quote at the end of this passage (emphasis added):

The company that makes Miami-Dade's machines, Election Systems and Software of Omaha, Neb., has provided corrective software to all nine Florida counties that use its machines. One flaw occurred when the machines' batteries ran low and an error in the program that reported the problem caused corruption in the machine's event log, said Douglas W. Jones, a computer science professor at the University of Iowa whom Miami-Dade County hired to help solve the problem.

In a second flaw, the county's election system software was misreading the serial numbers of the voting machines whose batteries had run low, he said.

The flaws would not have affected vote counts, he said - only the backup data used for audits after an election. And because a new state rule prohibits manual recounts in counties that use touch-screen voting machines except in the event of a natural disaster, there would likely be no use for the data anyway.

State officials have said that they created the rule because under state law, the only reason for a manual recount is to determine "voter intent" in close races when, for example, a voter appears to choose two presidential candidates or none.

Under the standard as stated here -- i.e., including "overvotes" in the vote total -- Gore would have officially won Florida. As it was, more people showed up at the polls in Florida in 2000 and thought or hoped that they had voted for Gore rather than Bush, but that wasn't enough to give Gore an official victory.

Dear Florida election officials: get it right this time, please.

Can't get on to the Miami-Dade Electoral Reform Coalition web site to see how I can send them some money, but here are links to ACLU Florida's voting page and the NAACP Miami-Dade branch.