Take a hypothetical election. It involves County 1 and County 2. County 1 has 100,000 voters, and County 2 has 100,001 voters. County 1 voters vote 100% Democratic, and County 2 voters vote 100% Republican.
So the Republican wins by 1 vote? Not so fast.
County 1 uses OpScan machines with a 0.3 error rate.
County 2 uses Votomatic machines with a 3% error rate.
So the actual totals are
Democratic: 100,000 less 0.3% = 99,700
Republican: 100,001 less 3.0% = 97,001
In this case the different error rates of the voting systems were sufficient to change the result of the election and thwart the will of the voters. I say in this case that the machines favored the Democratic candidate.
Would you argue that the machine count was fair and favored neither side? If so, please explain your logic. Do vote counts need intent in order to favor one candidate in your opinion?
As for Katherine Harris, you will not convince me that using her discretion to cut off recounts that canvassing boards had decided to do was "correct". I will only admit that it was not illegal. But I still have the strange idea that elections officials ought to be in favor of accuracy in close elections.
In the USC decision, the court ruled that similar ballots must be treated similarly in a recount, or it violates the equal protection clause. In the Florida count certain counties, who all used the same OpScan ballots, treated them differently. Some counties manually counted machine-unreadable ballots and some did not. Now, mathematically speaking, the potential effect of counting undervotes by differing standards must be less than the potential effect of counting them in one place but not counting them at all in another, since the disputed ballots are a subset of the undervote as a whole. Likewise for counting the overvotes. To invalidate only the recount while permitting the count amounts to permitting the greater violation of equal protection while invalidating the lesser violation.
That is why I say the original count had equal protection problems.
So you are saying the FL SC did not set a standard, even though they legally could, because they thought they would be overturned by a politically based decision from the US SC? If that is what you are saying, I will say that is ridiculous imo. I thought us repubs were the suspicious ones.
Whether they had a legal right to set a standard or were in a Catch-22 is an open question. The behavior of the FSC tells me that they believed a specific standard would be overturned. I don't think there's anything ridiculous about considering the SC's opinion political, as I've said before. Nor is this my opinion only. |
