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Politics : Al Gore vs George Bush: the moderate's perspective -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Frank Griffin who wrote (8601)	12/9/2000 3:56:27 PM
From: Math Junkie	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 10042

Frank, I agree that there are problems in the process. My point was simply that I don't blame either campaign for their efforts. In my opinion the blame, if there is any, goes to the Florida Legislature, for writing election laws which are ambiguous enough to allow our courts to be turned into a three-ring circus. I thought that Florida's Chief Justice put it well, in his dissenting opinion: "First, there have been an enormous number of citizens who have expended heroic efforts as members of canvassing boards, counters, and observers, and as legal counsel who have in almost all instances, in utmost good faith attempted to bring about a fair resolution of this election. I know that, regardless of the outcome, all of us are in their debt for their efforts on behalf of representative democracy. "Second, the local election officials, state election officials, and the courts have been attempting to resolve the issues of this election with an election code which any objective, frank analysis must conclude never contemplated this circumstance. Only to state a few of the incongruities, the time limits of sections 102.112, 102.166, and 102.168 and 3 U.S.C. §§ 1, 5, and 7 simply do not coordinate in any practical way with a presidential election in Florida in the year 2000." a311.g.akamai.net (See pp. 58-59) I'll comment on some of your specific points below, although the U.S. Supreme Court's decision to stay the Florida Supreme Court's order may make it all moot. You wrote: "First, I question whether there can be a fair and honest "recount" when you start trying to decide, even though the chad is still intact and/or someone voted for two candidates for the same office, who the unknown voter really wanted to vote for." Certainly the fact that the Legislature has never provided a statewide standard for manual recounts presents a fairness problem in this case. I'll deal with marginal chad below, but with regard to ballots where two candidates were marked, the Florida decision did not order those to be recounted. Those are known as "overvotes", and they only ordered "undervotes" to be manually counted. "If you only count votes where the chad is dislodged I would have no problem. However, the machine has already made an accurate count of those. We are talking about "divining" what someone intended to do even though the evidence is nearly non existent. Your fingernail can create a vote the way they want to do it." The machines often do not count swinging chad and hanging chad, which are two examples which I think elections officials regard as being uncontroversial indications of voter intent. With regard to more marginal ballots, I saw an example of an indented or dimpled chad, I'm not sure which, where there was an obvious imprint from the end of a stylus. I say obvious because it was perfectly circular and of the right size to have been made by a stylus. The only way I can conceive of such an imprint's having been made was if the stylus had been pressed down firmly, and met some kind of resistance from underneath the ballot. So if they're counting that as a vote, I don't see the problem, as it's not something that could be made with a fingernail. I'm not saying that all ballots, or even a majority of them, are that clear. What I am saying is that there are examples where the intent is objectively clear. Now that having been said, I don't know what standards are being used, and I wholeheartedly agree on the need for a uniform and objective standard for hand counting. "Gore now reminds me of the guy Milosovich who everyone hated because he wouldn't concede nor go away. The people had to finally rise up to get him out." Pretty inflammatory. It would be just as easy to compare Bush to Milosevic, since the Democrats could argue that he is trying to "steal" the election by running out the clock on the election contest process. In my view, neither Gore nor Bush deserves such comparisons. There were MANY more reasons to hate Milosevic than election fraud. But confining ourselves to just the election issue, the fact is that he wouldn't even release the results of the count. That's a pretty vivid contrast to the current U.S. controversy, where every detail of the process has been on TV world-wide, 24/7. There were also doubts about the independence of Serbia's Supreme Court. It is impossible to overemphasize the importance of the fact that the U.S. has an independent judiciary, as evidenced by the fact that court decisions so far have been all over the map.