OT: Kodiak, Sorry I didn't reply sooner to your invitation to join you as Secretary of State. I had a little emergency (found out that eldest daughter was totally unprepared for finals in math and physics this week, ergo some intense tutoring). Of course I will accept. Only request is that you no longer accuse Peggy Noonan of wordiness. Coming from an attorney, some might consider this hypocrisy - and perceptions do count (especially if this election is as close as some say it will be).
Another interesting WSJ editorial:
opinionjournal.com
JOHN FUND'S POLITICAL DIARY
Gore's Electoral 'Lock Box'
With one day to go, Broward County "discovers" 500 ballots.
Saturday, November 25, 2000 6:22 p.m. EST
Comics made fun of Al Gore's constant use of the term "Social Security lock box" during the campaign. But now Mr. Gore's postelection permanent campaign has found its own security lock box: the ever-flexible Broward County Election Canvassing Board. Already Broward's Thanksgiving weekend recount had cut George W. Bush's 930-vote statewide lead by more than half.
Then this afternoon, Christmas came early for the Gore campaign. Judge Robert Lee, the canvassing board's chairman, announced that it would suddenly consider 500 absentee ballots it had not previously planned to count because they were "dimpled" or otherwise irregular. Republicans protested, and Judge Lee called a recess and asked William Scherer, the most voluble GOP lawyer, not to return to the counting room after it ended.
Absentee votes are cast by people using a paperclip to punch through a ballot attached to a piece of Styrofoam backing. The voter can clearly see how he voted and whether the chad fell out, unlike the Votamatic machines used at polling places in Broward. To count dimples on such ballots as the clear "intent" of a citizen falls close to inventing votes. It also is but the latest in a series of zigzagging standards the Broward board has used to evaluate ballots over the past 10 days:
• On Nov. 15, the board decided only to count those ballots on which two or more corners of the perforated chad were detached. At the time, referring to voters who failed to detach at least two corners, Judge Lee declared: "We didn't want to have to guess their intent. It was as if they didn't vote, because we're not clairvoyant."
• Four days later, the Associated Press reported that "the Board said Sunday it wold consider those dimples, pregnant chads or otherwise questionable chads after its appellate attorney, Andrew J. Meyers, said the two-corner standard wouldn't hold up in court." Mr. Meyers is a well-known Democratic lawyer in Palm Beach.
• On Nov. 23, Judge Lee explained the board's new standard: "It's not objectively subjective or subjectively objective, but I think it's somewhere in the middle." Glad he cleared that up.
Transcripts of the board's vote counting show that Suzanne Gunzburger, who like Judge Lee is a Democrat, is calling a clear majority of ballots for Mr. Gore. Judge Robert Rosenberg, a Republican, is very often skeptical of indented or dimpled ballots--frequently leaving Judge Lee as the swing vote.
The process leaves Burt Odelson, the lawyer who handled the famous Illinois dimpled-ballot case that the Florida Supreme Court cited extensively in its Tuesday decision, appalled. "This is as close to 'ghost voting' as you'll get," he says. Since the Florida court's ruling, a Chicago Tribune article has pointed out that far from allowing dimpled ballots, the Illinois decision upheld a judge who declined to count them.
But Democrats have moved on from citing the flawed Illinois precedent to attacking "thuggish" Republican demonstrators who they say intimidated the Miami-Dade canvassing board into canceling its planned recount. Nonsense, say board members. "I was not intimidated," David Leahy told CNN. "My vote had nothing to with the protests. It simply had to do with not enough time."
An interesting alternative explanation for why the Miami-Dade board acted as it did comes from Brian Kalt, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, who examined closely the 135 out of 614 precincts the board had counted before it stopped. He found that the board, counting in numerical order, had started with overwhelmingly Democratic precincts. Mr. Kalt says the recounted precincts cast 74% of their vote for Mr. Gore and only 24% for Mr. Bush. The county as a whole voted only 53% for Gore.
"In the recounted precincts, Gore picked up only 157 votes, and the count was just about to move into heavily Republican and Cuban areas," Mr. Kalt told me. "Given how the rest of the precincts would have voted, I don't see how Gore would have picked up votes. If the trend had continued, an admitted if, Bush would actually have gained 400 votes." It's possible that Miami-Dade's board, which contained no Republicans, also had that calculation in mind when it unanimously agreed to stop its recount.
Meanwhile, in Palm Beach County it's becoming increasingly likely that the board there won't be able to complete its tally of some 8,500 remaining ballots in time for tomorrow's 5 p.m. deadline. Yesterday the board counted 1,863 ballots. That's a rate of 165 ballots an hour. If they worked at that pace straight through until the deadline they would count only 5,115 ballots. This means Palm Beach may turn in only a partial count. The county could then ask the Florida Supreme Court for yet another extension. This would deny either candidate the bragging rights of a victory on Sunday, since Secretary of State Katherine Harris would be hesitant to certify a winner on the basis of what Democrats would call a partial count and Republicans a tainted one.
Democrats are pleased at the more lenient calls the Palm Beach canvassing board members appear to be making in the late going. "If we were giving them a grade, they'd have gone from 'not passing' to now 'barely passing,' says Democratic observer Bob Kuehne.
Judge Charles Burton, the Democrat who chairs the Palm Beach board, is at least honest about the enormity of the task facing the board. "It's very difficult to hold up a ballot and say, 'What was this person thinking?,' " he told the Palm Beach Post yesterday. "And that's what we're trying to do."
In the Middle Ages, wizards used to try to peer into the future by reading chicken entrails and other mystical signs. Now on the cusp of the 21st century we are turning to mind-reading in Palm Beach County, Fla., to divine the identity of the next president of the United States. Elections have been stolen in many other countries, but almost always behind closed doors. But this attempted heist is being played out in front of the world. It's riveting television, especially when you realize that once it's over, American democracy may never be the same. |
