Just so you know ...

From TNR, "Katherine Harris, Still Crazy," by Jonathan Chait:

The full extent of Harris's influence has faded from the public memory because of two subsequent events. The first is the Bush v. Gore decision, which made the Supreme Court, not Harris, seem to be the final arbiter of the election. Left forgotten by the Bush v. Gore controversy was the fact that several of Harris's interventions on behalf of Bush had been deemed illegal by the Florida courts, and they were never subsequently vindicated. These included her insisting that recounted ballots not accepted by the November 14, 2000, deadline were invalid and her maintaining that she lacked the discretion to accept manual recounts. In both cases, the Florida Supreme Court ruled against her unanimously.

What aided Harris even more was a 2001 recount of the Florida ballots by the National Opinion Research Center, conducted for a media consortium, which seemed to suggest that Bush would have won even without her or the Supreme Court. The media recount came out just weeks after the September 11 attacks, and the participating newspapers appeared to bend over backward to avoid tainting President Bush's legitimacy. Some press accounts asserted that a statewide recount--which Al Gore had futilely pleaded with Bush to accept and which the Florida Supreme Court ultimately ordered--"would have favored Bush," as The Washington Post put it.

This conclusion, however pleasing to the national psyche, was totally false. (See "Count Down," November 26, 2001.) It rested on the assumption that only ballots that had registered no vote at all--those pesky hanging chads--would have been counted. In reality, several counties were examining ballots that had been initially disqualified for registering two votes. There turned out to be a large net gain for Gore in such ballots, which typically included a vote for Gore as well as a write-in vote for Gore. The voting machines initially disqualified these votes, but a hand examination counted them because the intent of the voter was clear. And, if those votes had been included, Gore would have carried Florida.