I believe the electoral college is currently law, so if he wins the electoral vote, challenging it is challenging the law and the constitution. That's different than the example you cite...
I don't really understand what you're claiming here. In my earlier note, however, I should have made a distinction that is quite important. I continue to believe that there's nothing in the U.S. Constitution that would prohibit a candidate from transferring his or her Electoral College votes to another candidate, which technically is what a "winning" candidate would do upon conceding a state. The Adams-Clay-Jackson example illustrates the process of transferring Electoral votes between candidates (from Clay to Adams).
There is another factor here, however: state law. It would be possible for an individual state to legislate that the winner of the popular vote must retain his or her Electoral votes. I'm not sure that any states mandate this exactly -- and, most directly to the point, I don't know if Florida law says anything to this effect.
It's very difficult to determine exactly what Americans know about the electoral process. I've seen polls in previous elections where frightening numbers of people in this country didn't even know who the presidential candidates were, in the days leading up to the election. Now people intending to vote would know, of course, who the candidates were; but my point is that, in this country, there's a level of ignorance about political matters that reaches much wider than most of us would like to believe. On at least a couple of occasions, I've seen live interviews on the cable news stations with Palm Beach County voters who said that they double-punched. Unfortunately, the interviewers didn't ask them why they did this, so we couldn't learn what on earth they were thinking. But, unless these people were lying, the fact is that at least some Gore voters double-punched and then professed outrage that their ballots were tossed out. Go figure!
Regarding the number of double-punched ballots in Palm Beach County, I think it's more relevant to compare numbers within Florida in 2000 than to compare PBC's 2000 numbers against its own 1996 numbers; and I read a report somewhere (I can't remember where) that said PBC's number of double-punched ballots was significantly higher on a per-voter basis than other counties in the state. The same report compared the Presidential column on the PBC ballot with the column for the Senate race and found that the Presidential column was double-punched something like five times more frequently than the Senate column (which listed candidates linearly on the left page of the ballot).
The salient question regarding individual citizens' rights is this: to what degree do people have the right to be (1) ignorant about electoral procedures or (2) just plain dumb? For the past two days, I've been thinking, "How on earth could this small group of people, no more than 23,000, make these moronic mistakes with their ballots and, as a result, hold this entire nation hostage to their stupidity?" I totally concede that the ballot was understandable, if the voter had just taken a little time to figure it out, or request help, or whatever. However, the fact in Palm Beach County is that perhaps as many as 23,000 voters made their moronic mistakes and voted against their own wills. Of course, you'd expect a handful of folks to make mistakes in an election; but the numbers we're talking about here, with the same mistakes recurring over and over, inevitably raise questions about the integrity of the voting mechanism itself (ballot, polling machine, etc.).
It's unfortunate that the investigative process in Palm Beach County must inevitably become highly legalistic and technical during the course of this inquiry. A lot of people are going to blame the Democrats for the painful level of detail this investigation demands. But there's more on the line here than an election result, even given how important presidential elections are; the electoral process itself is at stake. |
