Reed Irvine - Editor
When David Boies, representing Vice President Gore, appeared before the Florida Supreme Court on November 20 one of the justices asked him if the court should be concerned about the standards used in hand recounts for judging "faulty chads." Boies said that was an issue the court should deal with and that in the Florida law "the test has always been the intent of the voter." Asked if he was saying "that any mark made by the voter would be evidence of that voter's intent and should be counted as such," Boies replied, "I think so, Your Honor, it is quite important that this court be as specific as possible in terms of the standard to be applied so that we will have uniformity."
Boies Gave Misleading Information
The Florida Supreme Court indicated what it thought the standard should be by quoting from an opinion of the Supreme Court of Illinois that said it would be wrong "to invalidate a ballot which clearly reflects the voter's intent simply because a machine cannot read it." It explained, "These voters should not be disfranchised where their intent may be ascertained with reasonable certainty, simply because the chad they punched did not completely dislodge from the ballot."
This shows that the Illinois Supreme Court was thinking of chads that were partially dislodged, but that is not what David Boies had in mind. Boies had told the court that any mark should be taken as indicating the voter's intent and referred to papers he had submitted about the Illinois Supreme Court decision in the case of Pullen v. Mulligan. The Illinois Supreme Court had upheld the trial court's verdict, and Boies had obtained an affidavit from Michael Lavelle, one of the attorneys in that case, in which Lavelle swore that the trial judge had approved counting indented chads as indicative of the voter's intent.
Two reporters for the Chicago Tribune researched Pullen v. Mulligan thoroughly. In an article published on Dec. 1, they claimed that David Boies, the super-lawyer, had given misleading information about the Illinois Supreme Court's ruling to both the Florida Supreme Court and the Broward County canvassing board. One of the Chicago Tribune reporters called Michael Lavelle and read to him from the transcript of a Sept. 17, 1990 hearing in the case that showed that the trial court judge had not counted indented or dimpled chads as valid votes, and the Illinois Supreme Court had upheld him. The Tribune reported that Lavelle promptly sent Boies a corrected affidavit in which he said that he was mistaken in his recollection of how the disputed ballots were reviewed.
That was sent early on Thanksgiving Day, the day after Boies had told the Broward County canvassing board that Lavelle's affidavit showed that the Illinois courts counted any "discernible indentation" as a valid vote. In response to a question about how to determine the voter's intent when "we see no light, there's just a mark," Boies said the Illinois case, "says you look for an indentation."
The Tribune reported that the judge did not even accept every ballot with light shining through. "In making his decisions," it said, "he considered whether he could determine the voter's intent by, among other things, seeing if the voter had made similar marks elsewhere on the ballot." The Tribune reported that Boies claimed that he had sent copies of Lavelle's second affidavit to members of the Broward County canvassing board. The board members could not remember having seen it, but they had heard from other sources that what Boies had said about the case had been disputed.
Broward Buys Boies's Standards
Nevertheless, the two Democrats on the Broward board, Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger and Judge Robert Lee, adopted the lax standard that Boies had recommended they use to judge disputed ballots. Judge Robert Rosenberg, the lone Republican, frequently dissented. The following is a transcript of their deliberation over one disputed ballot.
COMMISSIONER GUNZBURGER: I can see the light if you hold it just right.
JUDGE LEE: 5A-11 has a slight dimple on the spot. I have to try to remember these.
JUDGE ROBERT ROSENBERG: Cannot be ascertained with reasonable certainty.
COMMISSIONER GUNZBURGER: I disagree on this one because it's pushed more than a slight, and there is light visible in the bottom. I've read some of the opinions that say when there is light visible that it is a punch for the candidate.
JUDGE LEE: I don't see it.
JUDGE ROSENBERG: I don't see any light visible
MR. LICHTMAN (Democratic observer): Hold it up. I can see it from here.
COMMISSIONER GUNZBURGER: Turn it around.
JUDGE LEE: You're right. You can see it all right. I agree with the commissioner. 5A-11 is a vote for Gore.
On Nov. 22, four days before the deadline set by the Florida Supreme Court for the submission of the county tallies to the Secretary of State, the net gain for Gore from Broward's hand recount, adjusted for Bush's gain from newly counted absentee ballots, was only 68 votes. That was with all the precincts and two thirds of the absentee ballots counted. Four days later, on Nov. 26, in Broward's final tally Gore's net gain was 567 votes. This extraordinary increase in just four days came entirely from the "under votes," the ballots that did not show a vote for president in the machine count. They had been set-aside in the hand count because the intentions of the voters could not be readily discerned. The idea was to reconsider them after all the other ballots had been counted.
That gave the Democrats a pool of 6,716 under voted ballots in Broward County alone when they began their hand recount. The two Democrats on the Broward canvassing board could cast ballots for Gore simply by claiming that they could see an indentation or a pinprick on a chad. Judge Robert A. Rosen-berg, the one Republican on the board, often could not see what they saw, even using a large magnifying glass. He tried without success to get them to stick to the "reasonable certainty" standard laid down by the Florida Supreme Court.
Bush's lead was only 930 votes when Broward County began its hand count. Broward alone could have provided all the votes Gore needed to win Florida if its canvassing board had wanted to do so. They could ride roughshod over Republican objections. One Republican observer, attorney William Scherer, objected so persistently that the chairman, Judge Lee, barred him from the counting room.
It wasn't necessary for Broward to shoulder the entire burden of winning Florida for Gore. Gore requested hand recounts in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade counties as well. Each of them had over 10,500 under voted ballots, bringing the total available to more than 28,000. The canvassing boards in all three counties were under Democratic control. Trolling for ballots in these pools beat voting the dead. It could be carried out in public, and it was even seen on television. As the "deliberation" quoted above shows, the Broward canvassing board went beyond partially dislodged chads to determine voter intent. Republican observers charged that Commissioner Suzanne Gunzburger was bending ballots "in order to try to create or enlarge slivers through which light might pass."
Gore was obviously satisfied with the standards applied by the Broward County canvassing board. He did not include them in his suit to force additional hand counts. That was limited to Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties.
Judge Charles Burton, the chairman of the Palm Beach County canvassing board, was questioned at length about the standards his board applied in determining a voter's intent when he appeared as a witness in the trial of Gore's suit before Leon County Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls. Burton, a Palm Beach County judge, is a registered Democrat, as are the other two members of the canvassing board, Theresa LePore and Carol Roberts. He was not as openly partisan as Judge Robert Lee, his counterpart in Broward County. He had opposed conducting a full hand recount of all the Palm Beach ballots even though a sample hand count of four precincts had reduced Bush's lead over Gore by 19 votes.
Burton said that the standard they first applied when they did the sample recount was based on a 1990 court ruling in Palm Beach County that indentations should not be treated as an indication of a voter's intent. That was soon changed to what he called "the sunshine rule." If any light could be seen through a hole in the ballot it was counted as a valid vote. He said that resulted in anomalies that made him uncomfortable and they switched back to the 1990 standard.
Before the complete hand count was begun, there was a hearing before Circuit Court Judge Jorge Labarga. On Nov. 15 he threw out the 1990 standard for determining voter's intent. Labarga said the canvassing board could accept or reject ballots with indentations at its discretion. The board decided on Nov. 16 that a chad that is hanging with at least two corners punched could be accepted as a vote. It decided that chads with only one corner severed could be counted if the board thought there was clear evidence that it showed the intention of the voter.
Each ballot was shown to the Democratic and Republican ob-servers. The canvassing board reviewed those that were challenged. The board reviewed thousands of them, but Gore was not satisfied with their contribution to overcoming the Bush lead. On Nov. 20 his attorneys moved to clarify the standards, and Judge Labarga held another hearing. Burton told the judge that the great majority of ballots had dimples or indentations of some kind, some of which were barely discernible. He said there were many where it was very hard to determine the intent of the voter.
There were ballots with multiple dents in the first column where the presidential candidates were listed. There were many, he said, where observers from both parties agreed that there was no vote for president He said some had gone to the polls just to vote for sheriff, for example, and had cast no other votes.
Inferring Intentions Is No Science
Judge Burton's description of the problems created by voters who disregarded instructions showed why hand counts with no clear-cut standards are fraught with a high degree of subjectivity and tempt the members of the canvassing boards to award the votes they are judging to the candidates they personally favor. That is a temptation that those who take their politics seriously may find hard to resist when they know that their decisions could decide who will be the next president of the United States. That is the power that Judge Labarga gave the Palm Beach County canvassing board when he ruled that they could accept or reject indentations as valid votes.
In his testimony before Judge Sauls, Burton cited several examples of the problems they faced. Burton said they saw many ballots with a dimpled chad for a presidential candidate when all the rest of the votes on the ballot were cleanly punched out. The Palm Beach board decided the lone dimple should not be counted as a vote no matter how prominent it was. On the other hand, if there were five dimpled chads and 15 cleanly punched votes, the dimples would be counted. This suggests that if there is a dimpled chad for the presidential candidate of your choice and you can persuade another member of the board that there are four other indentations on the ballot, you can have it counted as a vote for your candidate. The same strategy might be used to reduce the votes for the candidate you oppose. Burton said that if there were a dimpled chad for one presidential candidate and a cleanly punched hole for another, the dimpled chad would be disregarded. It would not cancel out the clean punch. But presumably that could be contested if two of the board members claimed they could see several other indentations on the ballot, establishing the existence of a pattern.
The same strategy might be used to reduce the votes for the candidate you oppose. Burton said that if there was a dimpled chad for one presidential candidate and a cleanly punched hole for another, the dimpled chad would be disregarded. It would not cancel out the clean punch. But presumably that could be contested if two of the board members claimed they could see several other indentations on the ballot, establishing the existence of a pattern.
Burton claimed that the Palm Beach board had adhered to the standards set down by Judge Labarga, but he also admitted that they sped up their count as the Nov. 26 deadline set by the Supreme Court approached. On Nov. 22, according to the New York Times, the Palm Beach hand recount had produced a mere two-vote net gain for Gore, but their final tally, which was not accepted because it was submitted two hours after the deadline passed, showed a Gore net gain of 215 votes. This was in addition to the net gain of 643 votes for Gore obtained from the Palm Beach machine recount. In contrast, the machine recount in Broward County gave Bush a net gain of one vote and its hand recount gave Gore a net gain of 567 votes.
When the required machine recount of all Florida counties was completed, Bush still held a 930-vote lead. Gore was counting on hand recounts in Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade Counties to put him over the top. Miami-Dade severely dampened his hopes on Nov. 22, when its canvassing board voted unanimously to discontinue its late-starting recount. In four days, it had hand counted 20 percent of its precincts with a net gain of 157 votes for Gore, but for some reason the board decided that it would not be able to complete the count in the remaining 479 precincts in the four days remaining.
Furious Democrats blamed the decision on intimidation of the board by Republican observers who had noisily protested their exclusion from the room where the recount was taking place. All three board members and the one policeman who was keeping the protesters from entering the room denied that. He told a reporter that all he suffered was a headache from the noise they were making.
That meant that Gore would have to depend on the hand recounts in Palm Beach and Broward Counties if he was to eke out a victory. He was also challenging Nassau County's decision to certify its first vote count when the recount inexplicably came up with a total count that was two hundred votes lower than the first.
Two canvassing boards, composed of five Democrats and one Republican, had it in their power to decide whether Florida's 25 electoral votes would be cast for Gore or Bush. The Florida Supreme Court, by sanctioning the subjective hand count in three counties, had delivered to these six individuals the power to decide who the president of the United States would be. All they had to do was claim that they found enough dimpled or indented chads on the questionable ballots cast in Palm Beach and Broward Counties to overcome Bush's 930-vote lead. That was harder for Broward than for Palm Beach. It had fewer disputed ballots in its pool, and its machine recount had found only 87 ballots that changed the result. Forty-three of them were for Gore and 44 for Bush. But the Broward board was up to the task. Composed of two very partisan Democrats and one dissenting Republican, it managed to give Gore a net gain 430 times as large as the net gain for Bush in its machine recount.
Palm Beach, under the leadership of Judge Burton, a Democrat who had opposed the manual recount, let the Democrats down. All they had to do was conjure up a net change for Gore two-thirds as large as the Gore net gain produced by their machine recount and Gore would have been the winner. That shouldn't have been too hard. They had 10,582 under voted ballots at their disposal, and their machine recount had produced six times as many added votes for Gore as for Bush. Burton testified that the indentations were "barely discernible on many of the ballots." Given the standards laid down by Judge Labarga, who would accuse them of fraud if they made a few hundred questionable calls? Only their own consciences.
The Palm Beach board was more principled than the Broward board, and it stuck to higher standards. If the Broward board had known that Palm Beach would fall so far short, it might have fished even more votes for Gore from its pool of dimpled and unmarked chads. If they did that and if it survived a legal challenge by Bush, the year 2000 election would go down in history as having been decided by the Florida Supreme Court and a half dozen obscure county officials to whom it delegated the power to decide which candidate would win.
Some dictator is being quoted as saying he didn't care who voted as long as he had control over who counted the votes. That is what those who have agreed with Gore and his ardent supporters that hand counts are more accurate than machine counts overlook. John Ahmann, one of the developers of the Votomatic device used in Florida, testified in Judge Sauls' court that hand counts are a good idea in very close elections because when the chads are not completely detached they can be pushed back into the holes and prevent the light from going through the punched holes and registering the votes. That is why voters are instructed to examine their ballots and remove any hanging chads.
They are not a good idea when fallible human beings with strong partisan feelings and weak consciences are asked to divine the intentions of voters from barely discernible indentations on ballots, influenced by the assumption that how voters cast their votes in some races is an infallible guide to how they might have voted in others. Machines eliminate subjective bias. For hand counts to be reliable, the room for subjective bias must be minimized by the adoption of firm and clear standards and provisions for holding the human counters accountable.
The failure of achines in Florida to register a choice for president on one percent of the 6 million ballots cast doesn't mean that those voters were cheated and that divining their choice and registering it must remedy this. The highest percentage of under voted ballots in Florida was in a county where voters use pencils to indicate their choices.
On December 4, the New York Times in two front-page stories devoted about two thousand words to reporting on testimony by John Ahmann, an expert witness for Gov. Bush in the two-day hearing conducted by Leon County Circuit Court Judge N. Sanders Sauls on Vice President Gore's demand for a hand count of disputed ballots in two Florida counties-Miami-Dade and Palm Beach. Mr. Ahmann who had helped create and market the Votomatic voting machines used in those and many other Florida counties, testified for over an hour about the reliability of the machines and the problems caused by voter error in using them.
The Times showed little interest in Ahmann's refutation of claims by a far less qualified Gore witness that age, wear and tear caused by heavy use and poor maintenance explained the large number of ballots with indented, dimpled or partially punched chads found in the hand recounts in Florida.
What excited the Times was the discovery by Gore's lawyers that after Ahmann filed for a patent on improvements in the Votomatic twenty years ago, he told the Patent Office that under some circumstances the machines could punch the chads incompletely, resulting in serious counting errors. Its page-one story said that the last minute discovery of this patent application presented the Gore legal team with what it "jubilantly called the 'Perry Mason moment'- that delicious inevitable turning point when Mr. Mason's faithful secretary, Della Street, slips into the courtroom with newly discovered evidence that lets him spring a coup de grace that reduces the witness to tears and confession."
Reporters David Barstow and Dexter Filkin wrote, "A junior Gore lawyer rushed into the courtroom with a freshly unearthed document that Vice President Al Gore's lawyers now proclaim as a gift from heaven." Why? They explained, "Confronted with his old application, Mr. Ahmann before long was agreeing that in close elections, a manual recount is not a bad idea. The effect of his testimony was written plain in the strained facial expressions of the Bush legal team and in what Mr. Zack (a Gore lawyer) did when Mr. Ahmann left the stand. He shook Mr. Ahmann's hand." David Firestone, who wrote the front-page lead story in the Times that day, included 350 words on this supposedly big break for Gore. He omitted the date of the patent application and quoted Gore attorney David Boies's claim that Ahmann was the best witness for Gore's side. This is pure spin.
After reading briefly from a reply Ahmann had given to questions asked by the Patent Office in 1981 about the problems his improvement was designed to correct, and having Ahmann affirm that what he had read was correct, Gore attorney Steve Zack said, "Okay. I have nothing further on that. I'll move on, judge." He moved on to questions about the proper maintenance of the Votomatic and then asked about Ahmann's experience with hand recounts. After establishing that Ahmann had participated in some hand recounts, Zack said, "And, sir, you also believe as you told me, in close elections, you should have a hand recount. Is that correct?" After an objection from Bush's lawyer was rejected, Zack said, "Isn't that what you told me just the day before yesterday, sir?"
Gore's lawyers had learned how Ahmann felt about hand recounts two days earlier when Zack deposed him. The discovery of Ahmann's replies to the Patent Office was neither "a gift from heaven" nor a "Perry Mason moment." All three Times reporters missed that, and the editors wasted a lot of valuable space on a phony story that reeked of spin by Gore's lead attorney, David Boies. His success in spinning the Times may have raised the sagging hopes of Gore and his supporters, but not for long. Within a few hours Judge N. Sanders Sauls, who saw no "Perry Mason moment," and tossed Gore's suit out of court, dashed them by the U.S. Supreme Court and.
Send the enclosed cards or your own cards or letters to Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of The New York Times, Scott C. SmithScott C. Smith, CEO and publisher of The Chicago Tribune and an editor of your choice. A card that you may use to order a copy of Robert Stinnett's "Day of Deception" from AIM at a discount is enclosed. (See the Notes)
THE DATE ABOVE IS THE DATE ON WHICH I AM WRITING THESE NOTES. IF I FOLLOWED past practice, it would be November-B 2000. This has been bothering some readers because we often discuss in the reports, and especially in the Notes, material that has come to our attention later than the month printed on the report. We have decided that beginning next year we will quit dating the AIM Reports by the month and the letter A or B. They will identify by the year and the number of the report, from #1 to #24. We have been less rigid about sticking to deadlines in recent years than we used to be. Our articles are not as time-sensitive as news broadcasts and newspaper stories, and it makes sense to give you the date on which I begin to write the Notes. We are not in a race with the news media to get our articles into print. Most of them are about stories the media have shown no interest in reporting or stories that they have misreported. The AIM Report is a report about how news is reported or not reported. Sometimes it's new information about what happened decades ago. The first draft of history produced by the news media is often incomplete and inaccurate, but they are not especially interested in correcting it. The exposure of Harry L. Hopkins' service as a Soviet agent is a case in point.
IT HAPPENS THAT I AM WRITING THIS ON THE 59TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE JAPANESE AT- tack on Pearl Harbor. For several months I have been thinking of devoting an AIM Report to a book titled "Day of Deceit, The Truth About FDR and Pearl Harbor" by Robert B. Stinnett. The Free Press published it this year. John Toland, an expert on the war in the Pacific, has said of it, "Step by step, Stinnett goes through the prelude to war, using new documents to reveal the terrible secrets that have never before been disclosed to the public. It is disturbing that eleven presidents, including those that I admired, kept the truth from the public until Stinnett's Freedom of Information Act requests finally persuaded the Navy to release the evidence."
TOLAND IS REFERRING TO THE EVIDENCE THAT PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WAS VERY FRUST-rated by his inability to get America into the war to help the British defeat Hitler because of the strong isolationist sentiment that then prevailed and his campaign pledge not to get involved. The only way America could overcome this was by suffering an attack. It has long been known that Adm. Husband Kimmel and Gen. Walter Short, the officers commanding our forces in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, were not provided with the intelligence that Washington had about the imminence of a Japanese attack somewhere in the Pacific. It has been argued that Washington did not know the target of the attack in advance because the Japanese fleet was maintaining total radio silence. Stinnett, a journalist and former Navy officer, has obtained many long suppressed records that show, among other things, that we were intercepting radio communications from the powerful Japanese fleet that was sailing toward Hawaii. They were not shared with Kimmel and Short, who were made the scapegoats for the Pearl Harbor disaster. If you are looking for an interesting book for Christmas check out Stinnett's "Day of Deceit."
IN OUR LAST REPORT WE DESCRIBED HOW BUSH COULD HAVE WON A DECISIVE VICTORY. Polls taken in the past week indicate that if the election were held today he would win decisively. That is primarily because a lot of people who voted for Gore have become more aware of his true character since the election. He is trying to win Florida's electoral votes by hook or crook, and he is lying big time in the process. His supporters are battling to have over 15,000 absentee ballots in Florida's Seminole County and nearly 10,000 in Martin County thrown out because this would give Gore an insurmountable lead. Because he has been insisting that every vote should be counted, Gore has emphasized that he is not a party to these suits. His name is not on them, but his fingerprints are. Harry Jacobs, a wealthy Gore donor, to whom big Gore donor Steven Kirsch sent $250,000, filed the Seminole suit. They haven't ever met, but both have talked to Gore's lawyers. The New York Times and the New York Post both reported that Kirsch had given $500,000 to Gore's recount fund. The Post reported his funding of the Seminole suit, but the Times shrank from exposing Gore's transparent lie.
THERE WAS A LOT OF MISREPORTING ABOUT THESE CASES BEFORE THEY WENT TO TRIAL. It was frequently said that Republican election officials in Seminole and Martin counties had allowed Republican operatives to alter the absentee ballots. R.W. Apple Jr., the chief correspondent of the Washington bureau of the Times, made this error in a story published on Dec. 5. He wrote that the plaintiff charged, "A Republican election official had illegally helped supply addresses and other data for absentee ballots." The truth is that voter registration numbers, which were required to be entered on absentee ballot applications, had been omitted by mistake from application forms that the Republican Party had printed and made available to its members.
WHEN PARTY OFFICIALS LEARNED OF THE OMISSION THEY OBTAINED PERMISSION FROM the election officials to fill in the registration numbers on the applications that had been signed by the voters and sent to the elections office. In Seminole County a Republican worker was allowed to do this in a room in the elections office using his own laptop computer with the voters' names and numbers. In Martin County, a Republican official was allowed to take the applications out of the office to fill in the missing numbers. The Democrats had also had absentee ballots printed for registered Democrats, but the voter registration numbers were printed on their ballots and no correction was required. This was clearly stated by the plaintiff's attorney, who said, "The Democrats got it right." Despite that, he argued in court that the Republican election officials had discriminated against the Democrats by not inviting them to come in and correct applications submitted by any Democrat that might be missing a number. No such invitation was extended to either party.
GORE HELPED SPREAD THAT FALSE CLAIM. AT A NEWS CONFERENCE ON DEC. 5, HE WAS asked about the Seminole and Martin County cases. He said, "Well, there were more than enough votes to make the difference that were apparently thrown into - the applications for ballots were thrown into the trash can by the supervisor of elections there, apparently, even though they were missing the same number that the Republican Party workers were allowed to come in and fix the other applications....Apparently the Democratic Party chair was denied the opportunity to even look at the list of applications, whereas the Republican Party workers were allowed to roam around unsupervised inside the office and bring their computers in and fix all of the ballot applications for one side even as the Democrats were denied an opportunity to come in, denied a chance to even look at the applications and those applications were thrown out. Now that doesn't seem fair to me. And apparently in Martin County they were allowed to go in and take all the applications home with them."
KATHERINE SEELYE'S FRONT-PAGE STORY IN THE NEW YORK TIMES ABOUT THE GORE news conference reported what Gore had said this way: "Mr. Gore clearly feels wronged by what happened in Seminole and Martin Counties, where, the suits alleged, election officials improperly allowed Republican Party workers to correct absentee ballot applications that otherwise would have been rejected. 'More than enough votes were taken away from Democrats because they were not given the same access that Republicans were,' Mr. Gore said, describing in detail what happened in those counties." That appeared alongside a complete transcript of Gore's news conference and gave the impression that his account was accurate.
ON THE NEXT PAGE, A STORY BY MICHAEL COOPER REPORTED ACCURATELY THAT BOTH the Republican and Democratic Parties had printed and distributed application forms for absentee ballots and that the Republican forms "lacked voter identification numbers because of a printer's error." But later in the story, Cooper wrote, "Similarly incomplete Democratic applications, having also been rejected, piled up in Mrs. Goard's office (the elections supervisor) with no action taken." He went on to say that the plaintiff's attorney, Gerald F. Richman, "argued that Ms. Goard had given fellow Republicans special treatment that changed the outcome of the election." Cooper's failure to point out that the Democratic Party had not omitted registration numbers or any other required information from their printed application forms made it appear that Richman's charge of disparate treatment of Democrats was accurate.
LIKE THE TIMES' "PERRY MASON MOMENT" STORY DISCUSSED IN THIS AIM REPORT, THIS kind of reporting explains why public mistrust of the media has reached a new low. According to a Gallup poll of 1,026 adults conducted on Dec. 2-4, 65 percent think that news organizations do not get the facts straight and only 32 percent think they do. Gallup has been asking this question since 1985, and the previous low point for the press was in August 1988, when 50 percent did not believe the media got the facts straight and 40 percent believed they did. The latest poll found that 29 percent thought the media favored the Democrats and 15 percent thought they favored Republicans. The failure of the media to tell the truth about Vice President Gore's record and character during the long election campaign is, in my view, responsible for the post-election mess. If the media had told the truth about Al Gore, George W. Bush would have won in a landslide.