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

To: H-Man who wrote (124068)	1/28/2001 10:10:04 PM
From: Nadine Carroll	Respond to of 769670

H-man, Some followup questions to your reasonable answers: To be outside normal statutory construction (and make new law) one would have to prove that the “Palm Beach” standard, violated the “intent of the voter”. That would be an extraordinarily heavy burden. That sounds very reasonable; I just have trouble believing that if it were as simple as that, the FSC would not have established a standard. They certainly behaved as if they had no right to extend their interpretation beyond "intent" of the voter. And of course it would have been appealed to the USC immediately. Also remember, that the original author, built the argument here on the statement “Legislature declared that the only legal standard for counting vote clear intent of the voter”, which is provably false. Since the intent of the voter is the ONLY standard in the statute I don't understand why this statement is false. I suppose they could have. That would have taken the Florida electors outside of safe harbor. To do so would be to violate the intent of the Florida legislature, and the interpretation of state law by the Florida Supreme court. If the USC could have moved the December 12 date what makes it a "binding" date? Deference to the State Legislature?Certainly not their deference to the FSC. If they had decided the recount was constitutionally necessary then surely the date would not have been "binding"? This is why I get confused when you call the original author a liar for saying the date was not binding. No because there is no assertion, that the intent of the voter is given any more weight, once it is reasonably ascertained. Remember, what was happening here, a dimple in one county was a vote, a dimple was not a vote, in another. This gives more weight to one voter over another. Well, in the original Florida vote, some counties manually inspected and counted their under- and overvotes, while most did not. And there was not a uniform standard anywhere to be seen; the decisions were all under local control and differed from county to county. If this ruling means anything as precedent it has to render unconstitutional such decentralized vote counting systems. Otherwise you're arguing that to count a dimple as a vote in one county, but not in another -- that's unconstitutional, but to count undervotes in one place and throw the ballots in the trash in other -- that's fine. The majority decision does not directly rule on this, but it is very clear that they would find different voting systems to be unconstitutional, because of reasons previously discussed. I think you mean "they would NOT find different voting systems to be unconstitutional". Still seems a screwy argument to me, particular when you can demonstrate harm arising from different voting systems. It amounts to saying that similar ballots have a right to equal treatment, but similar voters do not. Did you see D'Ulio's article in the Weekly Standard (not a demolib rag) where he called this decision "equal protection run amok"?