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| Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 22 2012 @ 07:22 PM EDT |
An interim president might have been preferable.
But seriously in any other country they would have ordered an reelection in the
districts where the counting was messed up.
It is not really rocket science to organize an election where the results can be
relied on. There are procedures to follow. Don't Florida have any? [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Wednesday, August 22 2012 @ 07:25 PM EDT
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| Authored by: PJ on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 06:39 AM EDT |
| The problem is, we'll never know, because
the court cut off the recount, on the
grounds
that Florida's set up to do the recount wasn't
reliable and would take
too long to do, because
the law was votes had to be certified by a
certain date.
At that point, Gore was ahead on
votes counted, as there were some that
hadn't
been counted that had been found. So Florida had
ordered a recount. The
court stopped it.
Here's the
decision, so
you can read it for yourself and not rely on what
I or anyone
just asserts.
I don't think it's overstating
it that most lawyers were shocked that
the
court made what many viewed as a politically
based decision. Here's a site dedicated to
expressing
some of that shock. Note that one
Florida Judge issued a statement that Dec. 12
was
not a drop-dead date under Fl's law so it was not
just partisans who felt it
was all just an excuse
to put a Republican in office:
[I]n my
opinion, December 12 was not a 'drop-dead' date under Florida law. In fact, I
question whether any date prior to January 6 is a drop-dead date under the
Florida election scheme. December 12 was simply a permissive 'safe-harbor' date
to which the states could aspire. It certainly was not a mandatory contest
deadline under the plain language of the Florida Election Code (i.e., it is not
mentioned there) or this Court's prior rulings. Gore v. Harris, 773 So. 2d 524
(December 22, 2000) (Shaw, J. concurring; emphasis in original).
There were prior examples of states not certifying until January, due to a
recount. And the Sup. Ct. opinion itself said that it was “limited to the
present circumstances” and could not be cited as precedent, which some lawyers
question
as to whether the court had the authority to say that and make it
binding, and there is another issue, relevant still and maybe this year more
than ever, as the linked article from the NYTimes explained:The
heart of Bush v. Gore’s analysis was its holding that the recount was
unacceptable because the standards for vote counting varied from county to
county. “Having once granted the right to vote on equal terms,” the court
declared, “the state may not, by later arbitrary and disparate treatment, value
one person’s vote over that of another.” If this equal protection principle is
taken seriously, if it was not just a pretext to put a preferred candidate in
the White House, it should mean that states cannot provide some voters better
voting machines, shorter lines, or more lenient standards for when their
provisional ballots get counted — precisely the system that exists across the
country right now. And the current battle is whether Republican
swing states can set up different rules for counties are mainly Republican
(longer hours for voting) than for counties that are mainly Democratic, and
whether new voting ID laws are targeting
voters most liketly to vote Democratic.
Jon Stewart did a piece on it last night. Skulduggery in tilting the votes
is hardly new. It's not the voters who do it, however. It's those running the
show, and it's always been a little that way. These days, it's the worst I've
ever seen, and I view it that one side is sure it can't win in a fair election
and would rather avoid the majority wins concept as a result. I personally have
read enough about voting machines to know they are not reliable and can be
gamed, and I'm sure I'm not alone, so it's rather bleak at the moment. I also
note that the folks who make the
machines tend to be Republicans, so that
worries me as to fairness. I don't think it would be hard to throw an election
using computerized voting machines, and in many cases, there's no paper trail
that can be checked later. So the problems the court listed in Florida with the
paper ballot machines are no better and in fact voting machines
I think today
are worse. SO if the court was right to say that the system that year violated
the Constitution, it
surely still does, yet no one seems to want to fix it this
time.
To say that no final outcome was possible in the Bush
v. Gore election
is
to say that no outcome can now be determined
with finality, because nobody
allowed the recount
to continue, and that would not have needed to
go on for
years and years. The recount, for whatever
reason, the one stated or what most
believe it really
was, was
halted. And the saddest part is that after
that
decision, many Americans simply lost faith in the
court and in the
fairness of elections, and most
Americans now don't even vote. Keep in mind
that
I'm not political, so this is just a restating of
the facts as I find them.
And if you wish to
argue about it, you must do what I did and find
some
evidence for your statements. Bald assertions
that it was like this or like
that will be
removed from this point onward in this thread, as
will politcal
remarks. You can discuss the facts
if you want to, although I expect you won't
want
to on these terms. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 06:45 AM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: stegu on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 09:54 AM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 10:05 AM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: alanjshea on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 10:30 AM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 11:00 AM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: kuroshima on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 11:45 AM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 01:47 PM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 02:03 PM EDT
- Exactly - Authored by: stegu on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 04:10 PM EDT
- Exactly - Authored by: PJ on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 04:55 PM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 04:11 PM EDT
- Unfortunately - Authored by: darkonc on Saturday, August 25 2012 @ 04:27 PM EDT
- As I recall it - - Authored by: Imaginos1892 on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 02:59 PM EDT
- As I recall it - - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, August 23 2012 @ 03:38 PM EDT
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