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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Neocon who wrote (110542)	12/11/2000 12:40:41 PM
From: Scrapps	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Glad to hear there was some heavy questioning about the validity of non-cleanly punched ballots. One person reports a question was asked about if the instructions for voting properly were available...answer was yes. Throw the dimples and hangers out!!!

To: Neocon who wrote (110542)	12/11/2000 12:49:10 PM
From: mst2000	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 769670

The Florida legislature delegated to voters the right to elect presidential electors, and to the courts the responsibility for resolving an election contest. That's where the legal analysis begins and ends. The laws they created suck and are missing detail that in hindsight would have been nice to have, but that is not the candidates' fault, nor is it the courts' fault. Poorly drafted legislation should not justify ignoring the fact that the Florida legislature delegated to the Florida courts a specific role in deciding an election contest. Also, Florida laws makes it unlawful to stop a recount once it is started, and, in a recount, to ignore any ballot which reflects the voter's intent. It specifically contemplates that the Courts will be the final referee. And the result, if the recounts are concluded, is one that will be much more legitimate than a per se rule that we cannot examine punch ballots not tabulated by the machines in these counties. The only standard that we know is clearly wrong is never looking at the ballots manually. And Governor Bush is a hypocrite of the first magnitude for arguing that the standards being used in Florida are unfair (or the fact that they vary in different counties is unfair) when the law he signed in Texas establishes standards for counting dimpled chads that are far more liberal in counting them than any standards that have been applied thus far by any county in Florida. Apparently, what is perfectly OK in Texas is apparently the tantamount to the antichrist in Florida, because of a technical argument about the fact that the only standard the Florida legislature gave in the statute ("the intent of the voter") is open to interpretation. The ONLY standard that we know is wrong is not looking at all at the ballots to see what they show. with the recovery rate so far, there are clearly thousands of votes that have yet to be tabulated in Florida. So the Bush answer (derived solely from thefact that he still finds himself ahead thanks to his "don't manually recount at all costs" legal strategy) is to adopt the only standard that must be wrong and never even look to see regardless of what "seeing" shows us, and accuse any who disagree of "stealing the election". Indeed, the severe and harsh rhetoric from the Bush campaign and its supporters throughout the post-election period regarding the legitimacy of hand recounts and the motives of those seeking them in counties with higher undervote percentages is leaving an anti-democratic imprint that will make it very difficult for Bush to "unite" the Country when this ends, and stands in stark contrast to the "I'm a uniter, not a divider" rhetoric that preceded the election. Who would have thought that a mere request for a manual recount, perfectly legitimate under existing Florida law, would have created this much of a firestorm. What pierces through is that Bush is every bit the phony Bush supporters have tried to make Gore out to be -- a phony who will say anything and take any legal position, no matter how offensive to the voters of this country, to get elected – he only managed (with the help of the media) to pull the wool over our eyes more effectively than Gore did. The case Gore has brought is very simple, and it is ridiculous that anybody has turned it into an offensive on democracy when exactly the opposite is true. The legal case is built on the proposition that these are ballots that everybody concedes were legitimately placed into the ballot box by real voters, but as to which there is disagreement as to whether the machines tabulated them properly. To get to the bottom of this, the Gore campaign requested recounts two days after the election, well before it had to, and they had every right to expect that the recounts would be conducted under the rules of the game in existence on election day. Nevertheless, the Secretary of State of Florida abused her position (and revealed the improperly partisan nature of her role in this) by instructing Counties erroneously of supposedly "narrow grounds" upon which a recount could be based (findings that the Florida Supreme Court unanimously agreed were erroneous as a matter of law under the statute), took other steps to actively interfere with the recounts and question their legitimacy, and then the Bush camp went to the mattresses with an all out legal battle – starting from from the moment the machine counts ended – to make sure the hand recount never happened. Not that it be conducted fairly, mind you, but that it never happen, which is the one thing the Florida laws NEVER contemplated.. Even the inventor of the Votamatic machine, who was brought in by Bush as a witness in the Contest action, acknowledged in cross-examination that one MUST actually physically examine undervote ballots in a close race with a high percentage of undervotes. Not that you should, but that it's the only way to know for sure if the ballots really do contain legally cast votes or reflect voter intent with reasonable clarity. That is not changing the rules in the middle of the game, that is enforcing the rules as they existed before the election, and allowing the courts to serve in its traditional and historical role as referee when litigants disagree on what the law requires (a role that the Florida election contest statute specifically contemplated). One cannot cannot help but marvel at how this got screwed up to the point where GOP lawyers can take the exact opposite sides of the same issue on consecutive days in the same Courthouse, all with a straight face (I am referring to positions taken by the Bush lawyers in the Seminole and Martin County cases where they advocating overlooking technical laws directly on point to reach a result in favor of counting votes). Incredible. The hypocrisy is mind-boggling (I happen to agree with the decisions in the Seminole and Martin County cases, BTW, but I think the position they have taken in the recount cases is venal – nothing short of corrupt, and by extension, evil). The bottom line is this: For all intents and purposes, the election in Florida (indeed throughout the nation) was a tie, and there is no easy way out of that. It would probably be fairer and more honest to both sides if they simply flipped a coin. My guess is that the Supreme Court will rule for Bush today, given their ruling on the stay over the weekend, but if they don't (and if the recounts are concluded with Gore winning) there is no doubt in my mind that the Bush campaign will not accept that outcome, but will move its legal fight to the GOP controlled Florida legislature and the GOP controlled U.S. congress because their point through all of this has not been about fairness – but about winning. Sad. MST