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

To: G_Barr who wrote (285465)	8/9/2002 7:21:02 PM
From: Thomas A Watson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

you also have not read and understood Chief Justice Rehnquist, with whom Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas join, concurring: No reasonable person would call it "an error in the vote tabulation," FLA. STAT. Section102.166(5), or a "rejection oflegal votes," FLA. STAT. Section102.168(3)(c), when electronic or electromechanical equipment performs precisely in the manner designed, and fails to count those ballots that are not marked in the manner that these voting instructions explicitly and prominently specify. If no error in vote tablulation occurs then there is not reason to do a manual recount. The scheme that the Florida Supreme Court's opinion attributes to the legislature is one in which machines are required to be "capable of correctly counting votes," Section 101.5606(4), but which nonetheless regularly produces elections in which legal votes are predictably not tabulated, so that in close elections manual recounts are regularly required. This is of course absurd. The Secretary of State, who is authorized by law to issue binding interpretations of the election code, Sections 97.012, 106.23, rejected this peculiar reading of the statutes. See DE 0013 (opinion of the Division of Elections). The Florida Supreme Court, although it must defer to the Secretary' s interpretations, see Krivanek v. Take Back Tampa Political Committee, 625 So. 2d 840, 844 (Fla. 1993), rejected her reasonable interpretation and embraced the peculiar one. See Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris, No. SC002346 (Dec. 11, 2000) (Harris III). The Unamymous REMAND But as we indicated in our remand of the earlier case, in a Presidential election the clearly expressed intent of the legislature must prevail. And there is no basis for reading the Florida statutes as requiring the counting of improperly marked ballots, as an examination of the Florida Supreme Court' s textual analysis shows.