What you posted wasn't reality. It was alternate universe spin from the GOP.
If it weren't for the fact that the system didn't intend a candidate to attempt to gleen territorial advantages, and that algor attempted to get exactly that, algor might have received a full fair count just by asking.
fact: the system does intend for hand recounts to occur. Florida stautes provide that a candidate may request recounts in up to four counties. Gore did this. Bush could have. Instead, Bush realizing that he would lose if all the votes were counted decided to stall with countless lawsuits and requests for injunctions. The Bush-Baker team also engagaged in all-out war on the Vice President, leaving nothing standing in their scorched earth policy to bring the democrats to their knees and submit to the maifest destiny of President Bush.
Had the system intended the "Counting Grubbing" " style skewed countings which algor sought, you can bet Bush or any opposition candidate would have sought to hand-count his own territory too.
It what the Florida law requires. Gore follows the rule of the law, to you it's just a platitude. Bush did get hand recounts in numerous Florida counties. Here is a small sample of the areas in which Bush benefoited from hand recounts (did Bush refuse to accept these votes? No)
Orange County (http://orlandosentinel.com/automagic/news/2000-11-10/ASECelrecount1111000.html) Most of the "new" votes in Orange came from ballots that simply weren`t counted Tuesday night, mostly because the machines couldn`t or wouldn`t read them.
Seminole County (http://orlandosentinel.com/elections/1110sem.htm) The margin preserved Bush’s tenuous hold on Florida, giving him a 327-vote lead in an unofficial tabulation of the recounts in all of Florida's 67 counties. The process is far from over, however. Democratic offiicals have demanded manual recounts -- such as the type that took place in Seminole -- in four counties, including Volusia.
Polk County (http://www.theledger.com/local/elections/12pore.htm) Some ballots were improperly marked and had to be examined by the canvassing board. Some voters marked the oval on the ballot but didn't darken it enough to be counted. Some voters wrote in the name of Bush or Gore in addition to darkening the oval. Those ballots would have been considered invalid by the machine on the first count. But many were counted Saturday and added to the candidate totals. Under Florida law, a canvassing board is to determine the intent of a voter where that is clear and award the vote. Each of the Polk ballots in question were examined by Republican and Democratic party monitors, who got to look but not touch.
Gasden County (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/11/politics/11REPU.html) But in Gadsden County, the canvassing board decided to examine 2,124 ballots that had been rejected by a counting machine because more than one candidate had been chosen on each. Here, as in a handful of other counties, voters marked paper ballots with a pencil. The canvassing board did not examine the rejected ballots on election night. The next day, when they sorted the rejected ballots, the canvassing board counted 188 new votes: 170 for Mr. Gore, 17 for Mr. Bush, and 1 for a local write-in candidate. Members of the canvassing board insisted they had complied with Florida law. They said they had only counted those ballots on which the intent of the voter was absolutely clear. "We were trying to determine the intent of the voters," said Judge Richard L. Hood, the chairman of the canvassing board and a Republican. "As far as I was concerned, the election was fair."
Various Counties (http://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/16/politics/16HAND.html) Limited hand-counting did take place in at least some of the seven counties Democrats cited: Franklin, Gadsden, Hamilton, Lafayette, Seminole, Taylor and Washington. In some of the cases, election officials counted by hand only the ballots that counting machines had rejected, usually a small percentage of the total. The hand counts were done not necessarily at the request of the Republicans, but as part of the county's vote-counting procedures. In six of the the seven counties, the Republicans picked up votes. But the Democrats also picked up votes, and in one case, they picked up far more. A similar hand count was conducted in Lafayette County in northern Florida. Though nearly 90 percent of the county's 4,040 registered voters are Democrats, the county voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Bush. Officials tried to decipher some 220 ballots the machine had rejected. Lana Morgan, the county supervisor of elections, said officials were able to determine the voters' choices on about 50 of 220 rejected ballots. In an interview today, Ms. Morgan said no one kept track of how many of those votes were for Mr. Bush or Mr. Gore.
Various Counties (http://www.salon.com/politics/feature/2000/11/28/hand/index.html) In Republican Seminole County -- where local Democrats are suing because Republican election officials allowed GOP party volunteers to correct absentee ballot applications that had been filled out improperly -- the canvassing board decided to manually examine unreadable ballots during the county's electronic recount. Seminole's recount yielded an additional 98 votes for Bush. A similar procedure was followed in Polk County, where a partial manual recount resulted in Gore losing 90 votes that had apparently been counted twice. Canvassing board member Bruce Parker classified his county's actions as "a mini hand count." In Taylor County, where Bush picked up four votes, Supervisor of Elections Molly Lilliot said all ballots were re-fed through the tabulating machine for the recount. "All ballots kicked out were examined individually by the canvassing board," she said. "We ran all the ballots back through the machine," said Carol Tolle, supervisor of elections in Hamilton County. "Every time you had an overvote or undervote, we inspected it. If we could determine the intent of the voter, we counted those votes." In Hamilton, Gore ended up picking up seven votes.
Polk County (http://abcnews.go.com/sections/politics/DailyNews/florida_election_recount_001116.html) A similar sort of review benefited Bush in the more Republican Polk County, where Bush appeared to post his largest gain over Gore in a Florida recount, 108 votes. Canvassers discovered some voters had improperly voted twice on some of their ballots by both voting for their candidate, Gore or Bush, and writing-in that candidate’s name, says Polk elections Vi Thornburg. The vote reading machines had rejected those votes altogether, spitting the ballots out into a special container. Since those voters clearly wanted to vote for just one candidate, canvassers added the votes to the candidates’ tallies, one per voter, with more ultimately going to Bush, she says.
This was wholly unprecedented, unintended, and you can't change that fact.
It is not unprecedented. Hand recounts are so common place that the statutory and case law is very clear. Hand recounts are to be preferred to machine recounts because the punch card system has inherent flaws. The only thing unprecedented is the S.Ct. sanctioned subversion of the Constitution and Bill of Rights. |
