Bosco, for the last month we have been watching this saga developing on the news channels, so much that my son revolted last week and told enough with this electioneering. Well, this was his first election, and he voted for Nader (what else would you expect?). Today, he called us from the road since he heard on the radio about the decision, and guess what, he was actually enthused. When I queried, what is that sudden interest, he responded quite logically, the Seminole/Martin county decisions and the Fl-SC decisions were congruent. How so, I asked. And his response was in both case we have a question of voters intent being "crossed" with the "hypertechnicallity" of other laws. In Seminole/Martin, the clear violation of the Florida election laws by some Rep officials (but none by the voters themselves) and in FSC case, the technicality of timing (more than the legislature originally "prescribed", and now manual recount for counties where no candidate requested it within the first 72 hours of election), all in order to get to the voters intent (all those voters that voted but the machine could not read their intentions.)
I have been telling him for weeks that he'd better pay attention since this is a once in a life time event to see how our system can work. I am sure that there are a lot of legal grounds on which the US-SC could throw out the FSC judgement, but it will be very interested to see if they indeed order a "stay" of the counting. On what ground? Damage to Bush's Presidency if the count find for Gore (and later the count is thrown out by the US-SC, and Bush prevails), that argument should not hold since there are already requests under the freedom of information act to count the vote post the selection of the electoral slate, and thus the truth, whichever it is, will come out. The FSC was very wise in ordering the state wide count, but I really do not know what is the legal precedent that they based this on. Maybe it was the question raised by Bush in front of the Atlanta Court as to fairness in counting only three democratic counties, but that was decided by that court not to be "damaging" to other voters. In any event, that order will preempt any future doubts as to who really won. The interesting language about the counting standard (according to the FL legislature, namely determining the "Voter's intent") is also interesting and I already heard some talking heads discussing the lack of uniformity in the various standards that are going to be used (and that is apparently according to the legislature which let each canvassing board determine its own standard). So what if they are not uniform? They do not use a uniform voting system either. Optical readers where only .3% undervote is registered and punch cards where 1.5% undervote is registered, is not what I would call uniformity when the whole election is determined by 930 votes (the first machine count) out of 6 MM, or .015%, and now, with only 154 votes separating these candidates, the difference is .0025%, I would say that counting these 1.5% is important, my guess is that .3% will be intentional "no vote" (like in the optical scanners) and 1.2% will be intentional votes for Pres, but with variety of difficulties of determining the intentions.
They will probably not be able to determine the intention for half of these, but the last .6% of determinable votes, or some 36,000 votes might determine quite rightfully (and no longer just in dem counties) who won that election. My own guess for various reasons is that the partition will be 19,600 to Gore and 16,200 to Bush, giving Gore 3400 votes, enough to overcome the mere 154 current advantage Bush has.
These are historical times, IMHO, and I think that in few months, we will agree that the FL-SC had a Solomon like case on their hand, and acted appropriately.
Zeev |
