Dear Windsock:
The counter argument is simple. The ballots as they were received were checked for relevance (voter name, postmark, voter address, and witness verified) before allowing the vote to count. This is a higher standard than in some places (like Miami Dade, Palm Beach, and Broward Counties where some people who had no right to vote were voting (felons on probation)). Did you miss all that coverage on the hurdles required of absentee ballots?
When the case is heard, we will know if, this same policy was available to the Democrats had they requested it. If it was allowed to them as well, no matter whether they took the canvas board up on it or not, then there is no foul due to the rules were in place before the election and that the canvas board do have a lot of disgression within the Florida election laws. At least, they did catch it before the election (when they can do something about it) and not after the election (Palm Beach comes to mind). If the form was given out in error or was defective (per law), this might be an effective remedy as long as all sides know (was the fact that the form was defective published by the typical means (here, the Jefferson Sentinel publishes such notices and the Watertown Journal does also) and thus every voter and/or local party officials have the same right to fix it in the same way).
These things happen all the time when the laws change. A county official gets a voter request for the form to request an absentee ballot. The form is sent. The voter fills out the form completely and mails it back. Another official looks at the returned request, finds the Voter ID Number missing, and thus fails to mail the absentee ballot to the voter. The voter calls up and asks why they did not get the ballot. The voter is told that the voter did not supply the Voter ID Number on the request. The voter responds that the ballot request form did not ask for the number or provide a place for it. The official says "(expletive deleted)!!!! This form is wrong. If you provide your Voter ID Number over the phone, we will fix it and send you the absentee ballot immediately!". Then the official finds out that the form has been sent out to thousands of voters and decides on the following actions: 1) Look at all rejected requests and see if enough information is on them to figure the Voter ID Number out (and fix them while sending the ballot out). 2) Publish the fact that this happened and for anyone still wanting an absentee ballot to follow the procedure below. 3) Get anyone to help with implementing 1, when the fact that thousands of requests need to be fixed.
Given 3, it is not unusual to get the local party's help in doing 1. These situations are rarely commented on or very rarely objected to where the usual fix is "send some of your people to help us with your party's vote requests".
If the remedy for this is, as requested by the Gore Campaign, to throw out all the absentee ballots (15 thousand) then, the obvious thing to do in Palm Beach County is to throw out all the butterfly ballots as well (all several hundred thousand of them) since they too were illegal (per Gore). Then Gore would lose the Florida vote by a huge margin and the election would be over period.
IMO, these absentee ballots will not be thrown out.
Pete |
