Manual recounts have been part of the process in contested elections.
Especially in Texas.
In a sense, Skeets is right, each person is defining fair based on what it will take for them to win. Gore has begrudgingly moved towards what a reasonable person would say is fair -- hand recount the whole state or just the chad-inspired precincts, or whatever -- but that's because he has to, he's still on the losing end of the election. He would have, like Skeets said, have gotten a lot more credibility if he had asked for a broad-based in his manual recount push from the get-go and taken the stance that it was the fair thing to do and let the cards, chards, chads, whatever, fall where they may. Also, he should have come out publicly and said those absentee ballots which had a form error should be counted because nobody should be denied a vote because of form error. (That would be consistent, then, with his rationale for griping about voter intent and the butterfly ballot.)
While Bush has certainly done nothing to achieve greater accuracy, can you really blame him? It would be like winning the Superbowl on a close play and the other team contests the final play, or tries to, but they have no more instant replay challenges left. So the losing coach asks the winning coach to voluntarily do it for them. I don't think so... and of course, the other coach would never ask, either. (Although, maybe after this election they will have an army of lawyers do the askin'.)
Ultimately, I feel that Gore had the opportunity to be credible and uphold fairness in the most accurate way possible, but hesitated (or didn't act at all in the absentee ballot case), and thus revealed his hand. I don't doubt that Bush would have been the same or worse had the roles been reversed, partly because of his statements on (or before?) election night about going to the people should he win the popular vote but lose the Electoral vote. At least Gore has been steadfast on that front.
--Ben |
