LETTER TO ALAN COLMES
Bill Haff (page 20)
07/20/01

Mr. Colmes:

I can't believe you made the remark you supposedly made on Fox the other night, referring to the New York Times articles that detail the new revelations of Republican manipulations in Florida, and commenting: "So? Bush would have won anyway."

First of all, they don't know for a fact he would have won - there is no way to prove how many of the legal overseas ballots would have gone to Gore. Plus it's quite possible ALL the illegal unpostmarked ballots were for Bush, assuming they were part of a post-election effort to solicit illegal votes from military personnel. This is not as farfetched as it sounds. The percentage of the late ballots that arrived without postmarks was over 17 times the national average, and the Pentagon has "no explanation" for this. Doesn't this strike you as the least bit odd?

Second, the report shows how blatantly abusive and dishonest the Republican campaign was at its heart, and casts doubt on Republican candor about many other aspects of the election. There were a number of other disputed votes and if the Republicans were as dishonest in those areas as they were shown to be here I have no doubt a realistic vote tally would have awarded the presidency to Gore. The two conflict-of-interest issues described (Harris's office coordinating with the Republican campaign, and the military cooperating with public relations actions and joining the effort to put pressure on the outcome - Schwarzkopf accusing Gore of being unpatriotic, for example) are fundamentally at odds with accepted standards. They show the Republicans were willing to do anything - anything - to win this election.

Please, do not say "so what" to such important issues as these. If issues like these weren't important we wouldn't have ethical considerations and we wouldn't have laws.

Sincerely,

Bill Haff
Boston, Massachusetts

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