Bush's Best Case for "Public Consumption"
Disclaimer: There are many other arguments the Bush team could make, but this is, in my opinion, their best argument to make to the public, since it's relatively simple. [Even this simple argument would need to be collapsed into about a three-sentence sound bite; otherwise, the press will excerpt it and misrepresent it. Also, it seems that most Americans in this media age won't follow an argument that requires more than 15 seconds of rational, concentrated thought.]
Fact: Florida law states that the standard to be applied when manually counting ballots is that votes must be counted in the cases "where the voter's intent is *clear*"
Fact: In the case of a ballot with a "dimpled chad", it is impossible to tell whether a voter: (1)intended to vote, (2) started to vote and changed their mind, or (3)just somehow made a stray mark. Hence, no reasonable, objective person can possibly conclude that a voter's intent in such cases is "clear." (The only exception to this *might* be the case where the ballot contains incomplete punches on all/most races; however, that apparently represents an extremely small minority of the disputed "dimpled chad" ballots.)
Fact: This standard set by the state legislature was not followed in all of the manual recounts resulting in an improper inflation of Gore's vote total. For example, David Boies, the Gore attorney, influenced the Broward County election officials to apply a relaxed standard which allowed "dimpled chads" and other questionable ballots to be counted as votes. In order to accomplished this, hepresented them with an affidavit stating that "dimpled chads" had been counted in Illinois. This later turned out to be false. (They were counted *only* if the voter "left a pattern of dimples".) Boies also presented this false affidavit to the Florida Supreme Court and they cited this false information as an example in their ruling.
Fact: Even if it had turned out that some other state had used this relaxed standard, it would not justify election officials in Florida using it because, as I stated before, the Florida standard is that the votes should be counted "if the voter's intent is *clear*".
Fact: When Florida Supreme Court ordered the recount this past weekend, they included the votes from the tainted Broward recount as well as the votes from tainted recounts in other Florida counties (e.g. the partial count from Miami/Dade that was made up primarily of districts where Gore got over 90% of the vote).
Fact: The Florida Supreme Court's ordering this weekend of manual recounts of undervotes in all counties where undervotes had not already been manually counted would have done absolutely nothing to fix the problem because: (1)the weekend recount would have started out from a baseline of votes that were already tainted (e.g. Broward County and others weren't forced to recount based on the statewide standard), and (2) the court did nothing to ensure that the proper standard (e.g. no "dimpled chad", etc.) would be applied in any additional recounts.
Conclusions: The U.S. Supreme Court was right to stop the recount until they could sort all of this out because the result of it was guaranteed to be tainted and had the potential to do only harm and absolutely no good.
Here's a great article by George Will that articulates a lot of this:
sacbee.com |
