"But the consortium, looking at a broader group of rejected ballots than those covered in the court decisions, 175,010 in all, found that Mr. Gore might have won if the courts had ordered a full statewide recount of all the rejected ballots. "
So I am right.
Absolutely --- if by "Gore won" you mean that Gore might have pulled ahead, by around 115 votes, and been declared the winner, if all of the following had occurred:
(i) Gore had asked the courts for a full statewide recount, instead of the more-limited recount that he did ask for; * and
(ii) the courts had found sufficient cause to order such an expansive (and expensive) recount, instead of limiting the recount to specific areas where good reason had been affirmatively demonstrated; AND
(iii) in such a statewide recount, the various voting officials in Florida's 67 counties had (x) tagged the same specific 175,010 ballots as problematic as did the news organizations' independent observers, and then (y) reached the same conclusions about those ballots as did the independent observers. *
* As explained in the Times article
We can never know whether (ii) and, especially, (iii) would have occurred.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
Um, not quite; you've misstated the conclusion of the news organizations' study of the uncounted ballots. In a much-expanded recount, according to the Times wrap-up piece in November 2001 [1], Gore might have won in a few possible scenarios, but only by a teeny, tiny margin at best (smaller than the margin Bush ended up with). Even that possibility depended on the different counties' election officials recounting the disputed ballots in the same way that the news organizations' independent auditors did.
The Times had endorsed Gore --- as it has every other Democratic presidential candidate starting in 1960 [2]. Yet the lead grafs of the Times piece were commendably explicit: "A comprehensive review of the uncounted Florida ballots from last year's presidential election reveals that George W. Bush would have won even if the United States Supreme Court had allowed the statewide manual recount of the votes that the Florida Supreme Court had ordered to go forward. Contrary to what many partisans of former Vice President Al Gore have charged, the United States Supreme Court did not award an election to Mr. Bush that otherwise would have been won by Mr. Gore."
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/12/politics/12VOTE.html
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/10/28/opinion/presid...