On July 15, a thirteen-thousand-word article taking up more than four pages of the Sunday New York Times ran under the headline “How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote.” This was the product of a six-month investigation by twenty-four Times reporters of Florida’s treatment of 2490 overseas absentee ballots last November. The Times said 680 of these ballots failed to comply with state election laws, but they were counted because of intense Republican pressure.

      Bush won by 537 votes. It is obvious that the Times invested enormous resources in this project because it thought it was possible that it would be able to report that Gore actually won the election. It asked Gary King, a Harvard expert on voting patterns, to estimate what the final vote would have been if all the allegedly flawed overseas ballots had been rejected. King let them down. His best estimate was that Bush’s margin of victory would have been reduced to 245 votes and that there was only a slight chance that Gore would have been the winner.

      That was not the answer the Times was looking for. Seven years ago, Dean Baquet, a Times reporter who was later promoted to national editor, was assigned to look into the Vincent Foster case to determine if the Times should investigate it. After examining the material we sent him, he said it raised some interesting questions, but he believed that an investigation would find nothing but more unanswered questions. He said the Times could not afford to devote resources to an investigation that would not find any answers.

      The Times obviously did not decide to have 24 reporters spend six months investigating overseas absentee ballots in Florida with the expectation that it might find that Bush’s margin of victory was twice what it should have been. They wasted a lot of time and money looking for an answer they failed to find. They made it appear that they had uncovered a big story by wasting over four pages on what should have been given a quiet burial. George Stephanopoulos, a former top Clinton aide and now an ABC correspondent, summed it up saying on “This Week” that the Times found no evidence of fraud, no evidence that Republicans tried to solicit late votes and no proof that the counting was flawed.

      Bob Zelnick, a former ABC correspondent, showed in a column on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal that the Times had failed to report that Florida was required by federal law and a consent decree to count most of the overseas absentee ballots that the Times said were counted in violation of state law.

      Zelnick cited a memo by a Gore attorney telling Democrats how to get military absentee ballots thrown out. When the memo was made public, Senator Lieberman disavowed it on Meet the Press, saying that the Gore campaign did not want to disenfranchise servicemen overseas. Bush lawyers sued in seven counties where overseas ballots had been rejected on technicalities, expecting to gain hundreds of votes. The election was settled before the suits went to trial. The Times somehow overlooked all this.

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