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Politics : Why is Gore Trying to Steal the Presidency? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: sandintoes who wrote (752)	11/17/2000 1:56:09 AM
From: margie	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3887

"State election laws and procedures are the province of the states, but when they have been manipulated by local election officials in a manner that calls into question the fundamental fairness of the vote under the 14th Amendment, a request to the federal courts to intervene is not contrary to principled federalism, but in its best tradition."" "What's More Partisan: Man or Machine?", by William Bradford Reynolds. An OpEd from the New York Times, no less. November 17, 2000 nytimes.com ASHINGTON -- "In this election chaos, the controversy swirls around one central question: Is it fair to recount votes by hand? According to Democrats, the decision by Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, to reject new hand recounts is fundamentally unfair and will disenfranchise voters in counties seeking to recount their ballots. Methinks the Democrats protest too much. *It is the hand counting they urge — and that Palm Beach County has been allowed by the Florida Supreme Court to continue — that introduces political bias and unfairness into Florida's recount.* By now, it is clear that the machine count gives Florida to George W. Bush — at least until the absentee ballots are counted. But the Democrats, dissatisfied with the result, latched onto the more promising strategy of the "hand recount" in selected heavily Democratic counties. It is in fact highly irregular, perhaps even constitutionally impermissible, for state election officials to choose to count ballots in some areas of the state differently than in others. After all, why should Palm Beach County, which generally goes Democratic, get attention that Okaloosa County, which generally goes Republican, does not? The real mischief in Florida is that the recounts are dependent almost entirely on subjective judgment. In each of the counties selected, the local election officials — many of whom are, you guessed it, Democrats — now seek to divine each voter's true intention when his or her vote was cast. If there is disagreement, "true intent" is to be resolved by majority vote on each county's three-member "counting panel." And such judgments are to depend, remarkably, on whether a vote is a hanging chad (a hole punched partly through the ballot) or a pregnant chad (an indentation because the voter failed to pierce the ballot). How do the panelists decide? They hold the ballot up to the light, looking for holes. By nature, this is a subjective judgment. Now, predictably, even this standard is being challenged. On Wednesday, a circuit court judge ruled that the county could not necessarily disregard ballots with what were known as pregnant or dimpled chads. We will undoubtedly hear next: "How deep must the dimple be?" As the permutations of what constitutes a legitimate vote become more murky, one thing becomes surprisingly clear: Ballots need an impartial counter — which means humans should not be involved. Machines are, if nothing else, wholly unbiased, and if they record votes incorrectly, it is indisputably not because of party influence. Second-guessing of the machine vote by a hand recount that is by design highly subjective unavoidably introduces an element of political bias. If, as both Democrats and Republicans repeatedly assert, it is the individual's vote that matters, all votes should be treated the same. That is the only way to ensure that none are given undue preference (or are unduly devalued). That is the mandate of the 14th Amendment's equal protection guarantee in the Constitution. "That is why Republicans have taken the issue to the federal court. This move has been criticized as contrary to the states' rights ideals championed by Republicans. But Republicans have never argued that federalism means total abdication. "State election laws and procedures are the province of the states, but when they have been manipulated by local election officials in a manner that calls into question the fundamental fairness of the vote under the 14th Amendment, a request to the federal courts to intervene is not contrary to principled federalism, but in its best tradition." William Bradford Reynolds was assistant attorney general for civil rights in the Reagan administration. Hope the 11th District Court sees it this way this morning. I think I know where they should hang the stupid tag...not on Bush, but on those too stupid to see the "unbelievable hypocrisy" of some Democrats, the "New Commissars"