Clean, fair and above board? You must be kidding.
guardian.co.uk
"George Bush might have been prevented from entering the White House if a US supreme court judge had had another day to work on persuading his colleagues, according to a new book.
David Kaplan writes in The Accidental President that the liberal Justice David Souter met a group of prep-school students one month after the court ruled 5-4 in favour of stopping the Florida recount, making Mr Bush president rather than Al Gore.
"If he'd had 'one more day - one more day,' Souter told the students, he believed he would have prevailed," says Kaplan, according to an excerpt in this current issue of Newsweek.
"The sands of history will show Bush won by a single vote, cast in a 5-to-4 ruling of the US supreme court," says the book, touted as the first behind-the-scenes look at how the court handled the fallout from last November's disputed election "The vote was Tony Kennedy's. One justice had picked the president." Justice Kennedy, appointed during the Reagan years, is considered a moderate.
Justice Souter, installed when George Bush Sr was president, wrote in his dissent from the court's ruling that it "inevitably cast a cloud over the legitimacy of the election"...."
guardian.co.uk
"Thousands of black electors in Florida were disenfranchised in last November's election by an electoral system tainted by "injustice, ineptitude and inefficiency" a leaked report by the US civil rights commission says.
It accuses Governor Jeb Bush, the president's brother, and his secretary of state, Katherine Harris, of "gross dereliction" of duty, saying they "chose to ignore mounting evidence" of the problems.
The eight-strong commission, whose report will be published on Friday, found that black voters were "10 times more likely than white voters to have their ballots rejected", and pointed to the use of a flawed list of felons and ex-felons to purge the voting rolls...." |
