TG--- Re: the "NEWLY FOUND" box of ballots that just happened to be found someplace this weekend...???? Two and one half weeks after the election???? Has the press just MISSED this all together????
Edit: CF..Saw your opinionjournal link right after I posted this and found this article there....Hadn't seen this one.....TG, or anyone else, if there are any *other* articles about this you have found from credible sources, please let us know...
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Gore's Electoral 'Lock Box'
With one day to go, Broward County "discovers" 500 ballots.
opinionjournal.com
Saturday, November 25, 2000 6:22 p.m. EST
Comics made fun of Al Gore's constant use of the term "Social
Security
lock box" during the campaign. But now Mr. Gore's postelection
permanent campaign has found its own security lock box: the
ever-flexible Broward County Election Canvassing Board. Already
Broward's Thanksgiving weekend recount had cut George W. Bush's
930-vote statewide lead by more than half.
Then this afternoon, Christmas came early for the Gore campaign.
Judge Robert Lee, the canvassing board's chairman, announced that it
would suddenly consider 500 absentee ballots it had not previously
planned to count because they were "dimpled" or otherwise irregular.
Republicans protested, and Judge Lee called a recess and asked
William
Scherer, the most voluble GOP lawyer, not to return to the counting
room after it ended.
Absentee votes are cast by people using a paperclip to punch through
a ballot attached to a piece of Styrofoam backing. The voter can
clearly see how he voted and whether the chad fell out, unlike the
Votamatic machines used at polling places in Broward. To count
dimples on such ballots as the clear "intent" of a citizen falls close to
inventing votes. It also is but the latest in a series of zigzagging
standards the Broward board has used to evaluate ballots over the
past 10 days:
• On Nov. 15, the board decided only to count those ballots on which
two or more corners of the perforated chad were detached. At the
time, referring to voters who failed to detach at least two corners,
Judge Lee declared: "We didn't want to have to guess their intent. It
was as if they didn't vote, because we're not clairvoyant."
• Four days later, the Associated Press reported that "the Board said
Sunday it wold consider those dimples, pregnant chads or otherwise
questionable chads after its appellate attorney, Andrew J. Meyers,
said
the two-corner standard wouldn't hold up in court." Mr. Meyers is a
well-known Democratic lawyer in Palm Beach.
• On Nov. 23, Judge Lee explained the board's new standard: "It's not
objectively subjective or subjectively objective, but I think it's
somewhere in the middle." Glad he cleared that up.
Transcripts of the board's vote counting show that Suzanne
Gunzburger, who like Judge Lee is a Democrat, is calling a clear
majority of ballots for Mr. Gore. Judge Robert Rosenberg, a
Republican,
is very often skeptical of indented or dimpled ballots--frequently
leaving Judge Lee as the swing vote.
The process leaves Burt Odelson, the lawyer who handled the famous
Illinois dimpled-ballot case that the Florida Supreme Court cited
extensively in its Tuesday decision, appalled. "This is as close to 'ghost
voting' as you'll get," he says. Since the Florida court's ruling, a
Chicago Tribune article has pointed out that far from allowing dimpled
ballots, the Illinois decision upheld a judge who declined to count
them.
But Democrats have moved on from citing the flawed Illinois
precedent
to attacking "thuggish" Republican demonstrators who they say
intimidated the Miami-Dade canvassing board into canceling its
planned
recount. Nonsense, say board members. "I was not intimidated,"
David
Leahy told CNN. "My vote had nothing to with the protests. It simply
had to do with not enough time."
An interesting alternative explanation for why the Miami-Dade board
acted as it did comes from Brian Kalt, an assistant professor at
Michigan State University, who examined closely the 135 out of 614
precincts the board had counted before it stopped. He found that the
board, counting in numerical order, had started with overwhelmingly
Democratic precincts. Mr. Kalt says the recounted precincts cast 74%
of their vote for Mr. Gore and only 24% for Mr. Bush. The county as
a
whole voted only 53% for Gore.
"In the recounted precincts, Gore picked up only 157 votes, and the
count was just about to move into heavily Republican and Cuban
areas," Mr. Kalt told me. "Given how the rest of the precincts would
have voted, I don't see how Gore would have picked up votes. If the
trend had continued, an admitted if, Bush would actually have gained
400 votes." It's possible that Miami-Dade's board, which contained no
Republicans, also had that calculation in mind when it unanimously
agreed to stop its recount.
Meanwhile, in Palm Beach County it's becoming increasingly likely that
the board there won't be able to complete its tally of some 8,500
remaining ballots in time for tomorrow's 5 p.m. deadline. Yesterday
the
board counted 1,863 ballots. That's a rate of 165 ballots an hour. If
they worked at that pace straight through until the deadline they
would count only 5,115 ballots. This means Palm Beach may turn in
only a partial count. The county could then ask the Florida Supreme
Court for yet another extension. This would deny either candidate the
bragging rights of a victory on Sunday, since Secretary of State
Katherine Harris would be hesitant to certify a winner on the basis of
what Democrats would call a partial count and Republicans a tainted
one.
Democrats are pleased at the more lenient calls the Palm Beach
canvassing board members appear to be making in the late going. "If
we were giving them a grade, they'd have gone from 'not passing' to
now 'barely passing,' says Democratic observer Bob Kuehne.
Judge Charles Burton, the Democrat who chairs the Palm Beach
board,
is at least honest about the enormity of the task facing the board. "It's
very difficult to hold up a ballot and say, 'What was this person
thinking?,' " he told the Palm Beach Post yesterday. "And that's what
we're trying to do."
In the Middle Ages, wizards used to try to peer into the future by
reading chicken entrails and other mystical signs. Now on the cusp of
the 21st century we are turning to mind-reading in Palm Beach
County,
Fla., to divine the identity of the next president of the United States.
Elections have been stolen in many other countries, but almost always
behind closed doors. But this attempted heist is being played out in
front of the world. It's riveting television, especially when you realize
that once it's over, American democracy may never be the same. |
