The Florida Supreme Court decision was correct under the law. The court was merely trying to enforce existing state statutes -- common in all states -- which provide for hand recounts when machines fail to tally or read all cast votes. (Laws which the Florida legislature very recently strengthened, by the way, to prevent a repetition of widespread vote fraud in Miami-Dade where the anti-Castro Cuban crazies now wield far more political power over the election process, and local government in general, than their numbers would justify.)
To be sure, some Florida voters may have consciously decided to skip the presidential line while others intended to punch the card but failed to completely dislodge the chad because of the decidedly poor design of the punchcard system. Voting is not a grade school handwriting exam. Neatness does not count. Only the voter's manifest intent does.
In every state, including Florida, where the ballot manifests an intent of the voter to register his/her choice, that vote is to be counted regardless of some machine's inability to read it, or some accidental blotch of ink. That has been the law in Florida at least going back to 1876, when Tilden was cheated out of a clear Florida victory, and until today it remained the law in Florida.
By contrast, what the Rehnquist-Scalia majority of the U.S. Supreme Court is attempting, as Scalia's concurring opinion makes utterly plain, is to spend its prestige and corrupt its constitutional purposes so as to 'lend' an air of 'legitmacy' to the 'presidency' of George Bush -- mind you, before Bush has been declared the winner on January 6 when the Electoral College votes are announced in Congress.
If the Rehnquist-Scalia axis succeeds, tens of millions Americans will agree that two centuries of democracy in the United States have just been betrayed -- not by a state supreme court applying long standing state election laws, but by a radical right-wing cabal on the U.S. Supreme Court. |
