The vast majority of law professors say that the Democrats did nothing wrong and the Republicans fiddled the election. They also conclude the Supreme Court was wrong to award the election to Bush.

Oh PLEASE document this! I'd love to see the source of such a statement. If a single one of those "law professionals" is a Republican, I'll eat his briefcase.

You really don't want the history of the Florida elections laid out for you here. Ask anyone who knows me.

I can already tell ("award?") that you've never seen the Supreme Court decisions, that you never looked at the timeline, and that you buy into the myth that Gore was just sitting there on election night knitting a sweater when Bush suddenly roared in and swiped the election in front of Gore's shocked eyes.

Suffice it to say that Gore went into Florida with a detailed tactical maneuver prepared before election day, and tried one of the oldest tricks in the book. The irony is that all later recounts in the counties he picked out showed Bush winning anyway. Out of all the recounts, statewide and otherwise, there were a couple of specific ballot counting methods, that if used in a complete statewide recount, would have showed a Gore win. Naturally, after already seeing the results of the newspaper recounts, you would seize on this as the "one fair way" to count the ballots. Unfortunately for you, Gore feared how a statewide recount would have come out, and tried to tilt it by demanding recounts only in selected heavily Democratic counties. So I suppose he screwed himself, and not for the first time.

Like the article on vote counting says, you can make an election come out any way you want if you simply recount often enough and long enough.

And I'm really surprised you brought up the military ballots. It was quite a spectacle to watch Democrats on their knees, the shaft of light shining down on them from the clouds above, pontificating on how every vote must be counted, regardless of technical errors on the ballots, while simultaneously and deliberately trying to spike military ballots for lacking some postmark. The rank hypocrisy was obvious even to many Democrats.

The most important statement in the CNN article I quoted above is this (boldface mine):

On December 12, 2000, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned a Florida Supreme Court ruling ordering a full statewide hand recount of all undervotes not yet tallied. The U.S. Supreme Court action effectively ratified Florida election officials' determination that Bush won by a few hundred votes out of more than 6 million cast.

Using the NORC data, the media consortium examined what might have happened if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened. The Florida high court had ordered a recount of all undervotes that had not been counted by hand to that point. If that recount had proceeded under the standard that most local election officials said they would have used, the study found that Bush would have emerged with 493 more votes than Gore.

In other words, had the Supreme Court never intervened at all, Bush would still have won.

Get over it already.

After 2004, when Bush has blown the Democratic candidate out of the water, are we still going to be hearing all this bitching?