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Strategies & Market Trends : Zeev's Turnips -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bosco who wrote (285)	12/7/2000 9:44:05 PM
From: Carl R.	Respond to of 644

Yes, this is a tough case to find justice. Obviously the election commissioner must be punished, probably with criminal charges and a loss of job, but what to do with the votes? I can just imagine the hubris if these were the votes of black or minority voters, but since they are primarily white Republicans there shouldn't be as much backlash if they are thrown out. (Once again, external circumstances that should be irrelevant may come to play in determining the outcome.) The other thing that makes throwing all the absentee votes out a questionable alternative is that it isn't known what would have happened if these ballot applications hadn't been tampered with. Would the voters have submitted a new application? Would they have just gone to the poll and voted? Or would they have just skipped voting altogether? I suspect that most would have found some way of voting, so I have my doubts as to how much the actual election outcome was altered by this, but we will never know. Also, if some Democrat applications were tossed out, what did those people do? Did they re-apply? Did they vote in person? Maybe the fairest solution would be to look at these people and give them the same privileges as the others got. Find out how many Democrats who had applications tossed out failed to find some other way to vote. Maybe that would also give us a clue as to what the Republicans would have done if their applications had been discarded. Whenever I think of this case I find myself thinking about the lady poll-watcher from Palm Beach County who was on TV early in this whole mess talking about the confusion caused by the "butterfly ballot"; she said that there were a lot of confused people so she just "told everyone to vote for number 5" (Gore). If taken at her word, this would be illegal electioneering, obviously. Clearly if she did what she said she did, she should be punished because it is against the law. Now she might have influenced some voters, so should all the ballots from that precinct be thrown out since it isn't known how many people might have voted differently without her comments? In some ways setting up a rule that allows large quantities of votes to be thrown out for technical rules violations sets up a system that may actually foster more fraud in the future rather than less. Consider that someone may go to a precinct where his candidate can be expected to lose by a large margin, and then conspire to have some technical rule violated, only to have someone protest later and seek to have all the ballots thrown out. I'm glad I'm not the judge on this one. Carl