Gore's Pyrrhic Victory Grows

Al Gore's margin of victory over George W. Bush in the popular vote on Election Day has gone over the half-million mark, The New York Times said Saturday. That represents a rise of about 200,000 since Dec. 18, when the Electoral College made Mr. Bush president-elect.

The Times cited a new Associated Press state-by-state survey of the final certified results in putting Gore's popular vote edge at 539,947, vs. the 337,000 figure previously reported. The tallies were 50,996,116 for Gore and 50,456,169 for Mr. Bush.

Late tabulations of absentee ballots from New York and California were largely responsible for the bigger Gore bulge, according to Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, a non-partisan research group.

Election officials in the two big states say the late-counted absentee ballots there showed similar voting patterns to those tallied previously, in which Mr. Gore won the states handily. They also say the percentage of voters casting absentee ballots in their states has been on the rise.

The 2000 election, of course, was the first in 112 years in which the winner in the Electoral College lost the popular vote. Mr. Bush got 271 electoral votes, one more than he needed for a majority, once Florida's hotly-disputed electoral votes were put in his column.

For the sake of comparison, John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon in the 1960 presidential election by 114,673 popular votes out of 68.8 million cast. And in 1968, Mr. Nixon's popular vote lead was 510,645, out of 73.2 million cast.

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