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Politics : Ask Michael Burke -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (85901)	11/25/2000 7:33:19 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 132070

Wayne, I think that you, I, George Acton, and Skeets (well, most of the time ;-)) are trying to have a reasonable conversation on this subject. I don't think I accused you of bias (if I did, sorry). I think you're biased only in the way all of us are biased; we each lean to our own opinion. George has hit the nail on the head wrt to manual recounts, in my opinion. Reasonable steps could have been taken by both parties to ensure order and fairness; Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford offered their services as observers. I think that Republicans and the Democrats both made the back-of-the-envelope calculation that due to the location of punch-card voting machines, there were more uncounted Gore votes to be found (no cheating necessary) than Bush votes. Therefore manual recounts became the root of all evil to the Republicans. It is a matter of taste at this point, I suppose, which side's antics drive you the most crazy. I have less problem than you with the fact that they are recounting only Democratic counties because that is how the Florida system is set up; recounts are asked for as an adversarial process, and the assumption is that the Democratic advantage in certain counties will be offset by the Republican advantage in others. It didn't work that way this time, both because the Republicans blundered (I think) in clinging to a noise level lead, and the Democrats blundered in not going for a full recount off the bat. What makes me crazy about the Republican antics is that they are attacking and delegitimizing the very institutions that support due process. The automatic recount left Bush ahead by 300 votes out of 6 million cast? Obviously Gore should have conceded at once. Manual recounts are allowed by law? They are obviously biased and illegitimate. Recounts are overseen by the local canvassing boards? A bunch of Democratic political hacks, and it's suddenly an outrage that Florida never enacted uniform recount standards. The Florida Supreme Court declares that the Florida Secretary of State cannot exclude the results of all manual recounts from the vote? Obviously they too are now Democratic party hacks writing law from the bench. The Miami/Dade elections board declares that it wants to examine the 10,000 undervote ballots, which have not been counted even once to date? Well, storm the building, and ensure they won't have any peace to do the job. So although the Republicans have real complaints (I would list being out-lawyered and out-maneuvered on the ground at the head of the list), I think most of their complaints about Democratic canvassing boards and dimpled chads are something of red herrings, since there are no circumstances under which they would have accepted a manual recount. Therefore these things don't upset as much as they do you. I think that Bush will probably win in the end, if only because Republicans seem to want the Presidency so much more than the Democrats this time around. Since I like Bush even less than I like Gore, and consider him wholly unqualified to be President, I do not particularly regret him getting only after a huge recount fight.

To: Freedom Fighter who wrote (85901)	11/25/2000 8:50:47 PM
From: George Acton	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 132070

>> I would object to recounting only Republican strongholds using standards set by Republicans too. << I'm sure you want to be fair. The problem is that the Republican strongholds mostly used marked ballots or perhaps lever machines, which have a low error rate. There's no reason to expect much change, no matter whose standards are applied. Recounting punch-card ballots means recounting Democratic counties wit large numbers of votes. Whether this is unfair is definitional. It depends on what "bias" biases and whose ox is getting gored. I think Bush will be declared winner, but this probably doesn't reflect what the plurality of Florida voters had in mind when they walked into the voting booths. This isn't tragic -- we've had much worse occurrences in US history.