Come on. The alleged violation was, as you put it "The counting and recounting led to constantly changing totals so that is obvious. Differing standards existed in different counties, on different days, etc. "
Now, leaving aside the fact that this description equally well describes the way the election was conducted in the first place, what is the harm resulting from the alleged violation? That some votes in some places would be included that wouldn't be included in other places.
There is no evidence that these extra votes would favor one candidate over the other, unless you are alleging actual fraud, which the Bush campaign never did (in court; they did all the time on TV). The phrase "counting and recounting" is disingenuous in this context; presumably, however the court ordered statewide recount was conducted, it would involve recounting all the votes exactly once, with methods to be determined by the county elections officials.
Now unless you can show how the recount favored one candidate over the other, you can't say voters, Floridian or otherwise, were harmed. You might perhaps argue that the six million who cast machine-readable ballots were harmed by the slight dilution of their vote, but this does not seem a great harm, particularly if weighed against the harm done to voters who had shown clear intent on their ballots but who had been disenfranchised anyway.
To reach your conclusion, you really have to show that conducting the recount at all was illegal. Bush v. Gore did not say that. Do you say that? |
