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

To: sunshadow who wrote (111759)	12/12/2000 9:18:02 AM
From: H-Man	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Gotta 86 that thing. eom.

To: sunshadow who wrote (111759)	12/12/2000 9:19:17 AM
From: sunshadow	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

THE SHAM BEHIND `COUNT EVERY VOTE' Chicago Tribune 12/12 That distant thud you heard over the scrape of your snow shovel Monday reverberated all the way from the U.S. Supreme Court. It was the sound of Al Gore's "count every vote" mantra collapsing under the weight of piercing questions from several of the nine justices. The interrogation left Gore's lawyer, David Boies, stammering for answers. The justices pressed Boies on the most disturbing premise of the Gore campaign's push to keep vote counts going until they produce a Gore victory. Lawyers call this issue "equal protection," but any schoolchild familiar with playground justice would tell you it's just a question of fairness. For five weeks, Gore's lawyers pushed for the loosest measures of "the intent of the voter" that election officials would tolerate. That has left different counties tallying votes in different ways. It looked bad in the beginning, but not as bad as it looked Saturday when local officials all across Florida began to examine ballots that haven't indicated voter preference in the presidential race. The Florida Supreme Court had ordered that recount, but hadn't given guidance on obvious questions like, "Do we count pregnant chads?" Had the U.S. Supreme Court not halted these subjective recounts Saturday afternoon, any new Florida outcome would have violated the constitutional notion of equal protection: different Florida voters would have had their ballots evaluated in different, and unequal, ways. Forced by the U.S. justices to confront that unfairness, Boies wasn't free to agree. To do so would undermine the Gore team's strategy of grabbing votes any way it can, uniform standards be damned. Boies tried to evade the line of questions, and when that didn't work, he at one point went uncharacteristically speechless. This newspaper has said from the get-go that ballots must be counted in a uniform way, whether by hand or--as with the original count and statewide recount-- by machine. Boies' embarrassing attempt to suggest otherwise has knocked Gore off the high moral ground he's tried to secure: "Count every vote" turns out to be a platitude that obscures an eagerness to invent whatever--and however many--new rules it takes to win. There's no telling what the U.S. Supreme Court will do as it, in effect, decides the 2000 presidential election. Perhaps the justices will coalesce around the equal protection issue. That would be good news for Bush. But it wouldn't be as entertaining as it was to hear David Boies argue--to the exasperation of several justices-- that recounting without uniform standards is fair.