On the Votomatics: Boise did try to show they could err, but he didn't lose by his failure to prove it, as you suggested; he lost because he couldn't prove that the recount would change the result of the election. At least that was my reading of the judgement. The relatively high error rate of Votomatics can be attested to by elections officials and is even admitted by the manufacturer.
I have never defended Gore's suits against the canvassing boards. By Florida law, the judgement was theirs. I believe the Texas standard does actually count dimples, but I couldn't swear to it. In the Delahunt primary recount, dimples did count as votes.
Gore's recount requests all came after the automatic recount. If the SOS had wanted to encourage careful counting, she would have done it before the automatic recount, which she had charge of.
In this election, the machine count favored Bush, not by design but just by the types of machines used. Furthermore, some counties manually counted the machine-rejected ballots to be more accurate, while most counties simply ignored them even when they had shockingly large numbers of them. If Bush vs. Gore means anything as precedent, then Florida's decentralized counting system must be unconstitutional now.
Does it seem fair to you that the Supreme Court:
1) stayed a court-ordered recount to protect the "legitimacy" of Bush's victory
2) used a novel interpretation of the equal protection clause to declare the recount unconstitutional because it had no standard beyond "the clear intent of the voter". We'll never know for sure if the FSC would have been overturned for setting a standard, but they certainly behaved as if they believed it.
3) stopped the recount, certifying a vote count that had the same equal protection problems as the recount.
Doesn't this have an air of suppressing votes to hand Bush the victory? Many people far more knowledgable than I have expressed distress at this ruling. Not all of them are liberals, either. 585 law professors just ran an ad in the NY Times expressing their unhappiness with this ruling. |
