If votes in democratic counties are counted in ways that votes kicked out by machines are counted "manually", and not in republican counties, any statistician can tell you what the result will be. This is not "equal protection under the law", which is Baker's point.
The republicans chose not to take this path . . . .
Well, then, who requested the manual recount in Seminole County, a Republican stronghold?
And the "equal protection" argument is worthless, and LJB knows it. The guarantee of EP lies in the ability of people in each county to request a manual recount. The Republicans slept on their rights except in Seminole County, too bad. And there are not standardless delegations on the decision whether or not to have a manual recount, it is a right under the law.
Let's just use the machine count unless there is an obvious problem with the machine miscounting holes that were clearly punched. The latter is what the recount was intended to achieve, not the manufacturing of an intent of voters by looking at cards designed to be read by machines.
Well, the object of a recount is to confirm the counts of the tallied votes, and also to determine the intent of the voter when a VALID ballot has been cast but not tallied for mechanical reasons. The requirement that a ballot be valid as a precondition for being counted in the manual recount (most prominently, that it not have have two holes or attempted holes for president) is something that
Lying Jim Baker doesn't mention, because he wants to confuse in the public's mind the lawful and defined manual recount with the (baseless, IMO) alleged lawsuits claiming that poor ballot design caused confusion among the elderly and asking for a re-vote. In fact, as many have said, a ballot with two clean holes punched or bubbles darkened is invalid in most jurisdictions, including Florida, simply because even in a recount there is no way to determine voter intent. These lawsuits, which have not been filed by the Gore people themselves, are perhaps the dumbest move the Democrats have made, precisely because they give LJB the opportunity to mouth off sanctimoniously about them. You will not see the Gore people associate themselves with these suits.
The Republicans have way overplayed their hand on the recount squabble, and are going to be eaten next week for it, but even if they fall behind after the recounts, they may still win with the absentee ballots.
And if they do, they will have won fair and square, and they can start their PR campaign to convince us all that they are fit to govern. Now, that's an uphill fight!
EDIT: Tom, I see that I left unanswered one of your major points, namely that I thought it was OK if the manual recount employed different standards in different counties for determining theintent of the voter. First, in the absence of legislation specifying a rubric, or standard, for making this determination, the standard adopted need only be reasonable and nondiscriminatory. Given the same punch-card system, officials in one county could decide that one of four corners of the chad needed to be detached before the ballot would be hand-counted as a vote, while in another they might decide that two corners needed to be detached. If the standard is reasonable and nondiscriminatory, as these two are, it is OK. And of course, counties other than Palm Beach may use mechanically different types of ballots, such as optical scan ballots or put an X in the block manually read ballots, each of which would require a different approach and a necessarily different standard for determining voter intent by inspection of the ballot.
BTW, did you catch that one county board, comprised of two Republicans and one Democrat, is suing the Republican Secretary of State to extend the deadline for ceertification of the manually recounted results? Does the phrase "directory but not mandatory" mean anything to you, Roadkill? |
