Loopy, I based my statement on the recent announcement that, if Gore had asked for and had been granted a recount of the entire state of Florida, he would have won by a very slim margin. Normally I would link you to an article in a news service, but since the article might someday disappear, I think it's important to reprint it here (please forgive the gobbling of bandwidth). This is from MSNBC, dated November 12, 2001:

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BURIED TRUTH OF A FLAWED ELECTION
Florida votes, media spins, and a troubled world turns
By Eric Alterman, MSNBC CONTRIBUTOR

If all the ballots cast in Florida had been correctly and fairly counted, Al Gore would have won, according to a report by the National Opinion Research Center.

NEW YORK, Nov. 12 —  You would never know it from the confused, pre-crash coverage in the nation's elite media Monday morning, but Al Gore beat George Bush in Florida by almost every vote-counting standard save the one that the Gore team managed to choose. This is consistent with the Democratic candidate's hapless campaign. The Supreme Court did not have to take the election away from Al Gore: he and his campaign gave it away themselves. And in doing so, they helped George W. Bush and his minions undermine American democracy.

No matter how you count it, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote matter, Al Gore would be sitting in the Oval Office today.
MOST OF MONDAY'S headlines reporting the much-delayed results of the $900,000 study of more than 175,000 votes conducted for a consortium of eight news organizations by the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center (NORC) focus on the fact that when the Supreme Court issued its 5-4 decision handing the election to Bush — going so far as to reinterpret the law and refusing to allow its decision to be held as precedent — they were operating under a vote-counting scenario under which Bush would have prevailed. Indeed, Gore attorney David Boies, speaking before the court, explicitly ruled out a more inclusive recount of Florida's votes that not only would have elected his man, but would have been immeasurably more fair to the people of Florida who had a right to have their voices heard in determining their state's choice for president. Boies asked the Supreme Court to count "undervotes" but not "overvotes." Leave it to Al Gore to pick a legal team that fights tooth and nail against his best interests.

BURIED TRUTH
But buried beneath the deliberately misleading headlines on Monday is the inescapable fact that Al Gore was the genuine choice of a miniscule majority of Florida's voters as well as the victor by more than 540,000 votes nationally. On the other hand, George Bush would have won a recount using the "undercount only" scenario and so the Supreme Court majority that labored so torturously to hand Bush his "victory" dishonored itself for nothing. Al Gore professed a public desire to have Florida "count all the votes," but he never instructed his lawyers to demand the recount of all votes in all 67 counties that would have revealed his victory. (The award for most egregious misrepresentation goes to CNN.com for its headline that the results "showed George Bush winning even with a statewide recount." It showed nothing of the sort.)

Washington Post: Election 2000 was closer than close: Gore would also have won if Florida had managed to include the 113,000 ballots deemed to be spoiled by so-called "overvotes." Of these, more than 75,000 chose Gore and a minor candidate and just 29,000 chose Bush. Common sense demands that we admit that most of these voters were not supporters of either Patrick Buchanan or the Socialist Workers' Party. Again, Gore is the winner here by a significant majority. Moreover many overvotes were entirely legal. They simply weren't counted because a voter may have punched in Gore's name AND written it down to be certain the counter got the message. Gore never asked that these votes be counted, either.

MORE VOTES FOR GORE

Political parlance
Politics discussion board: As the Associated Press report put it, "In the review of all the state's disputed ballots, Gore edged ahead under all six scenarios for counting all undervotes and overvotes statewide." In other words, he got more votes than George Bush. Gore won under a strict-counting scenario and he won under a loose-counting scenario. He won if you count "hanging chads" and he won if you counted a "dimpled chad." He won if you counted a dimpled chad only in the presence of another dimpled chad on the same ballot — the so-called "Palm Beach" standard. He even won if you counted only a fully-punched chad. He won if you counted partially filled oval on an optical scan and he won if you counted only a fully-filled optical scan. He won if you fairly counted the absentee ballots. No matter how you count it, if everyone who legally voted in Florida had had a chance to see their vote matter, Al Gore would be sitting in the Oval Office today.

Of course these facts are of only academic interest. George Bush has been sworn in as president and the United States is at war and the media is not much interested in determining the democratic intent of the voters in an election already consigned to history. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer called the results "superfluous," adding, "The voters settled this election last fall, and the nation moved on a long time ago." Much of the national media apparently concurs. Indeed, they concurred even during the Florida recount. James A. Baker declared victory on behalf of his client, George W. Bush, on the basis of a faulty vote count and the media considered the rest of the story to be hardly more than wishful thinking and possibly self-hypnosis on the part of the Gore team. The narrative enjoyed a few interruptions of course, and required not only the Supreme Court to sustain it, but also what Paul Gigot of the Wall Street Journal termed a "bourgeois riot" by Republican operatives in Palm Beach county to shut down a vote that looked like it might go Gore's way. But it held.
PATRIOTIC DUTY?

The U.S. political system has produced virtually nothing to repair an antiquated election system that spends billions for advertising and almost nothing for accuracy.

One always had the impression that the major news outlets were reluctant to report the study in such a way that it injured Bush's shaky legitimacy. After Sept. 11, many seemed to feel it was their patriotic duty not to do anything to call into question the authority of the commander-in-chief. New York Times political reporter Richard Berke admitted as much when he wrote in his newspaper shortly after the attack that the NORC report on Florida now seemed "utterly irrelevant" and, had it been released too close to the World Trade Center attacks, "might have stoked the partisan tensions."

Obviously, those worries were for naught. The horrific crash of the American Airlines jetliner in Queens today ensures that even this study will receive next to no attention. But the ultimate price will not be insignificant. As recently as last week, according to the Gallup Organization, nearly half of Americans surveyed remain convinced that President Bush either "won on a technicality" or "stole the election." Even so, during the past year, the U.S. political system has produced virtually nothing to repair an antiquated election system that spends billions for advertising and almost nothing for accuracy. And in the election of 2000, it put the wrong man in the White House.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Eric Alterman is a columnist for The Nation and a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.