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

To: Thomas A Watson who wrote (161119)	7/15/2001 8:25:02 PM
From: asenna1	Respond to of 769667

So much for your vacnat Conservative mind.... "The Bush lawyers involved in overseas ballots gave different responses to whether they approached that Friday with a two- tiered strategy. Mr. Ginsberg acknowledged that they had fought for military ballots while opposing ballots from civilians. But Mr. Aufhauser said, ``There was no such strategy to do something in Palm Beach that we did not do in the Panhandle.'' But a review of the transcripts, minutes and recordings of canvassing board meetings shows otherwise. The records reveal example after example of Bush lawyers' employing one set of arguments in counties where Mr. Gore was strong and another in counties carried by Mr. Bush. County by county, and sometimes ballot by ballot, they tailored their arguments in ways that maximized Mr. Bush's support among overseas voters. They frequently questioned civilian ballots, for example, while defending military ballots with the same legal defects. In Bush strongholds they pleaded with election officials to ignore Florida's election rules. They ridiculed Gore lawyers for raising concerns about fraud, while making eloquent speeches about the voting rights of men and women defending the nation's interests in remote and dangerous locations. ``If they catch a bullet, or fragment from a terrorist bomb, that fragment does not have any postmark or registration of any kind,'' Fred Tarrant, a Republican City Council member from Naples, Fla., told the board in Collier County, a conservative outpost in southwest Florida. Making frequent and effective use of the protest form they had developed to defend military ballots without postmarks, the Bush lawyers succeeded in persuading three counties in the western tip of the Panhandle, all of them Bush strongholds, to disregard Florida's postmark rules. The three counties, Escambia, Okaloosa and Santa Rosa, counted 72 overseas ballots without postmarks, 63 from members of the military. ``We had never done it before,'' Pat Hollarn, the veteran Okaloosa County supervisor, said in an interview. In Santa Rosa County, Doug Wilkes, the election supervisor, tried to argue that ballots without postmarks should be rejected. ``The board always stuck to the rules, to the letter of the law of the State of Florida,'' he told his two fellow canvassing board members that Friday. He was outvoted." nytimes.com