This could really get wild...COMMENTARY
Time for the Ultimate Flip-Flop?
By Paul Strand
Washington Bureau
December 05, 2000
CBN.com - It may be Hail Mary pass time for Al Gore.
He's seeing his options for somehow winning the presidential race in Florida rapidly shrinking away.
The Florida Supreme Court is going to have to be amazingly nervy to overturn Judge Sanders Sauls’ absolute pummeling of Gore. Monday he went county by county through all of Gore's challenges and said why each county's votes are not worthy of recounting, re-jiggering or re-assessing.
The U.S. Supreme Court has already put a hold on the manual counts done after the Nov. 14 deadline in Democrat-larded counties and may even permanently toss them out in the next few days.
So what's a battered and bruised Gore campaign to do? Get desperate!
Remember that all this time Gore, Lieberman, Boies, et al, have been saying what really mattered here was fully and accurately counting EVERY vote? It didn't matter if Bush or Gore won, just as long as not one Florida voter was disenfranchised by not having his/her vote counted...even if that vote happened to be nothing more than a mere mark, a dimple of a dash, a bit of a bump. No chad is bad!
It would seem absolute rank hypocrisy then, wouldn't it, if Gore joined up with a Democratic activist who's seeking to have all 15,000 absentee ballots in Seminole County totally thrown out?
Well, hypocrisy or not, that's how desperate the Gore team may be.
If no court in the land allows them "just one more recount," the Seminole suit may be about the only game left in town.
What basically happened was that a Seminole County election official (who happens to be a Republican) allowed some other Republicans to fill in ID numbers that were inadvertently left off some 4,700 applications for absentee ballots. That's technically a no-no. And one Democrat says the same official turned him down when he wanted to fill in the same kind of ID numbers on forms for Democrats.
So the suit is seeking to get all of Seminole's absentee ballots thrown out since it's impossible to tell now which ballots were "tainted" by having had Republicans fill in ID numbers on the application forms.
Now, remember, nary a one of the 15,000 Seminole County voters who eventually filled out those absentee ballots is accused of any sort of wrongdoing. None would have even had anything to do with those ID numbers being written in by GOP members on the application forms.
But the Democrat who's bringing this suit says the only way to make up for this Republican skirting of the rules is to throw every single absentee ballot for the entire county into the dumpster.
So much for "counting every vote so that every vote may count."
And the Gore team won't rule out joining in this lawsuit. They're even admitting the Democrat activist who brought the suit consulted with one of Gore's attorneys before he sued.
But the thing is, Bush captured about 4,800 more of those absentee ballot votes than Gore, so if all 15,000 get tossed, Gore automatically goes thousands of votes ahead of Bush in the Florida count. The only way for The Great Vote-Counter to win may be to mass murder 15,000 votes!
The Seminole County case goes to court Wednesday. Let's see if Gore sticks to his guns...and the oft-repeated promise that he's in this only to see that every vote gets counted in Florida. Or let's see if he makes that Hail Mary pass and joins up with the Democrat who's happily willing to throw 15,000 of those votes on the dung heap.
One more matter. Congress could see some wild and wacky moments if this Florida debacle doesn't end by January.
Imagine this: some court somewhere somehow allows Gore to add up the numbers he needs at the last second to supposedly "win" Florida. The court rules a Gore slate of electors will represent Florida when the Electoral College votes December 18th. The Florida legislature, heavily dominated by Republicans, strikes back and names a second set of electors to represent Florida, this time a Bush slate.
This forces the U.S. Congress to have to decide January 5 which slate really represents Florida. But both houses must agree.
The House of Representatives, where Republicans still rule, easily goes for the Bush slate. But the Senate is now split right down the middle, 50-50. Al Gore, as the Senate president, has to step in and cast the deciding vote!
If the Senate picks the Gore slate and the House picks the Bush slate, the whole matter gets kicked back to Florida, where Gov. Jeb Bush, brother of George W., must pick which slate really represents the Sunshine state!
Or....Congress could just decide to toss out Florida's electoral vote altogether. Both houses might agree on that (and they must for this to work).
But then the question is, does one of the candidates still have to win 270 electoral votes? Or...because Florida's been booted...is the number now needed for a majority down to 257, and Gore wins because he has 267?
It's questionable who gets to decide this crucial matter. But if the Republican-dominated House gets its way, the 270 number would still be needed, and since neither candidate could get it, the House would have to pick the winner. Each of the 50 states gets just one vote in such a case, and Republicans rule in 28 states.
But the Senate picks the vice president, and since Gore would probably vote with the 50 Democrats against the 50 Republicans, Gore's running mate Joe Lieberman could well end up as Bush's VP!
Could things get any weirder? |
