Cobalt,
If the Florida recount had been allowed to go forward, I don't think anyone knows whether Florida would have sent one set of electors to the House, or two, as they did in 1876.
It would have been interesting to see the debate in the House. At least the election would have been decided by the governmental body the Constitution intended to decide contested Presidential elections. I haven't seen any analysis, either.
Just as an interesting point of comparison, I did some reading about how the recount was handled in the Washington state Senate race. For starters, the consensus seems to be that the voting process is well run in Washington, and the Secretary of State, Ralph Munro, did not work for either of the candidates. The newspaper did not even mention which party he belonged to. Next, the county canvassing boards inspect all questionable ballots as part of the original vote count. That is, they look at the machine-unreadable ballots, and if they contain a vote, i.e. they can divine the intent of the voter, they fix the ballots so the machine can read them. They take the hanging chad off punch card ballots, and connect the arrows on OpScan ballots. Then they run them through the machine again. I don't know what the standard is for dimpled chads, etc; no one filed a lawsuit or alleged equal protection clause violations. So by the time they needed to do the automatic recount, they did not have to look at the undervote and overvote; they had already counted all ballots that contained a vote. An orderly, sensible process. What a concept. And never a lawsuit in sight. |
