I understand your hypothetical situation with the voting machines, but feel strongly that your point is mute. All evidence suggests that this discrepancy is not some new phenomenon that was just discovered. You can't fix that HYPOTHETICAL situation in a super heated days after a close election. You need to go with the remedies on the books to be fair to all parties.
Hi Scott. I don't think the point is moot at all; I think it's what happened in Florida. Rather than saying, 'you can't fix it after the election' I would say it's awfully hard to fix after the elections officials have messed up as badly as they did in Florida.
Again, comparison with Washington State is instructive. They had the same mix of voting machines. Why didn't their recount degenerate into a blizzard of lawsuits? Because elections officials had found and counted all legal votes, using manual inspection of the undervote and overvote, as part of the initial count. There was no set of legal but uncounted votes to fight over. So the recount was just that, a recount of ballots that had already been counted.
If the Florida canvassing boards had done the same, this whole mess could have been avoided. But in Florida most elections officials never looked at the machine-rejected ballots, even where they were over 15% of the total due to bad ballot design.
You keep saying that the machines erred. People erred. Did anyone prove that Votomatics had no errors -- that every card in the machine-reject piles was the result of voter error? If so, I missed it. Second, there's no way to prove that person who committed the grave error of leaving a hanging chad was the same person whose vote failed to be tallied when the chad gummed up the machine. Third, some Florida voters did have the chance to vote over, because their precincts had equipment that told them if their ballot was no good while they could still get another one. This equipment made a BIG difference. The reject rate of OpScan counties was less than 1%. The reject rate of OpScan counties without it was 15%! Guess you disapprove, huh?
You are talking about the MANDATORY recount, right? If so, I believe that there is some discretion given the individual canvassing boards as to how they completed the recount
Actually I was talking about the original count. The canvassing boards did have complete discretion on how to count the vote and there was no statewide standard. Nobody thought it was illegal at the time. But the lack of statewide standards naturally led to some of the different counting methods that the SC found violated the equal protection clause in the recount. So if they violated equal protection in the recount, how come they were okay in the count? If they were legal then, are they still legal now?
"I happen to share your view that they thought it would be overturned. But that is because it would have been UN-CONSTITUTIONAL
Let me see if this restates your view. For the FSC to order a statewide recount without a specific standard beyond "intent of the voter" violated equal protection. For the FSC to order a statewide recount with a specific standard would have been unconstitutional. So in your opinion the FSC had no power to order a statewide recount of a contested election under any circumstances whatsoever? Kinda renders moot the laws concerning the court's power to fashion remedies in contested elections, doesn't it? |
