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

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (8930)	12/14/2000 1:00:33 PM
From: Lane3	Respond to of 10042

Why has that been so hard to understand? I understand just fine. I just don't agree. simply that their votes not be invalidated due to problems beyond their control... I know you think you're being really reasonable, but I have three problems with this. One is that you would treat service members differently, which implies that their votes are somehow worth more. You are unwilling to cut any slack for other classes of voters who face obstacles. I continue to take exception to that. Why are service people special? Is it a matter of patriotism, a matter of partisanship, or because you feel an affinity for them? It's not clear to me why you would favor that class of people, only that you do. The second problem is the definition of beyond their control. You dismiss the problems old people can have with ballots or getting to the polls suggesting that they should have gotten help from people like your mom so it's within their control. On the other hand, your GI is not expected to take any extra steps to gain more control over his situation. Lack of control can be an easy excuse, like dawdling over the ballot until there's no way it can meet the deadline and then blaming the delay on mail delivery. Or it can really be out of your control. But you never know which until you take responsibility. The third problem is enforcement. How would a county determine which failures to meet the rules were beyond the control of the service person and which weren't? Well, they probably couldn't. So what do they do with that? They could write some standards that end up in the Supreme Court. Or they end up giving a pass to all the GIs, which gets us back to problem number one--unequal treatment of one group. In real life we don't often get remedies for things out of our control. If I allow plenty of time to get to the airport but there's an unusually bad accident and I don't get there on time, they don't hold the plane for me because it was out of my control. It's just tough luck. Lots of well-intended ballots don't get counted. Every effort should be made to minimize them. But I don't agree with you that its a particular tragedy if some of them belong to service members. Karen