Who can forget this droll bit of Republican comity and commitment to “fair play”.
But legal! And Constitutional! Sucks like a thermonuclear Hoover!
[quote=“jtgain, post:59, topic:657052”]
I’m going to play devil’s advocate and say that when a law is in dispute, the courts are the place to solve that dispute. There were arguments that the deadline was able to be extended by the SOS in her discretion, but she didn’t use her discretion and refused in an arbitrary manner not to extend it.
[quote=“jtgain, post:59, topic:657052”]
Yes the courts do get in the fray but due to the peculiar nature of selecting presidential electors, the issue was Federal and not State.
Nope. If it is her discretion then any decision she made was by definition arbitrary. Where the court had a problem was she made a decision they didn’t want her to make.
The presumption being, of course, that she would conduct herself in a manner befitting her role and would uphold the principles she swore to. Is it your impression that she behaved in an honorable and impartial manner? As she was obliged to do?
Cite? And yes, you need to prove a negative, if you’re going to claim an absurd negative.
A cross bun?
Martin Hyde gives a good rundown:
The recount process as defined by the Florida state legislature was ridiculous. Gore looked like an opportunist when he asked for only Democratic precincts to be recounted, and wrecked his own credibility. The GOP tried to game the system to maintain the result from an early count. Both sides came out stinking.
Great argument for proportional assignment of electors, under which, incidentally, Gore probably would have won easily. Also something of a case for non-punch ballots.
IIRC, there were two seemingly conflicting statutes. One said that she “shall” certify the results by X day, but another said that she “may” certify the results by X day. The Florida Supremes held that this means she “may not” certify the results by X day. The FL Supreme Court was also terrible. I saw Bush v. Gore as a terrible piece of judicial activism that overturned a terrible piece of judicial activism, so everything worked out in the end.
But I do dispute that a discretionary decision by an official can be exercised arbitrarily. Statutes that give discretion to officials contemplate that they will use this discretion in an even handed and reasoned manner. If she decided to eliminate every fifth ballot, for example, that wouldn’t be reasonable even though she “may” rule on the lawfulness of a ballot.
Wow. I normally like Rational Wiki, but that’s horrible. That’s not anywhere near their site’s stated goal. It’s a guy on a rant. It’s even got conspiracy theory bullshit. That thing was just as woo-filled as anything I’ve ever seen.
It’s not that it’s inaccurate, it’s that there’s not even an attempt at accuracy. It’s just someone blowing off steam about something they dislike. It starts off stating facts, even citing them, but then runs off into nutters’ field.
And it’s not as if this is a new article or one with very little work on it. It’s been there forever and multiple people have contributed.
Seriously, BrainGlutton. You really think that citation has even the remotest value?
Paper punch ballots are probably the worst thing ever in election balloting, I had literally never even seen or heard of such a balloting system prior to the 2000 elections. Every place I ever voted either had one of two types of pencil and paper ballots (fill in a bubble beside your chosen candidate, or mark an x in a box), or the old school mechanical lever machines many people grew up associating with voting booths.
The lever machines worked fine, and were unambiguous most of the time. The paper ballots, while suffering from some of the defects of the paper chad ballots in that they could be marked incorrectly and then possibly subjected to a “subjective evaluation” (in which we have to guess at voter’s intention, which isn’t ideal for democratic reasons) in practice end up being a lot better than the chad ballots.
For one, I feel comfortable saying “fuck you” to people who mess up the paper ballots. They typically say, “mark [or fill in a circle] beside one and only one candidate, if you mark two, your vote cannot be counted.” It will usually even say if you accidentally mark the wrong candidate and erase it, and you aren’t sure that the erasure was complete enough you can ask for a new ballot.
With hanging chads, it’s honestly understandable that maybe some ballots the chad just gets knocked out over being jostled and moved around, so through no fault of the voter two chads are punched (or partially punched.) [Specific to Florida the butterfly layout of the ballot also made them needlessly confusing, especially to many older voters.]
Also with the old paper ballot, in a nightmare scenario where you have to “subjectively” analyze the marginal ballots I feel a lot more comfortable with the ability of that subjective analysis to reflect voter will. With one various states of punched out chads, it’s harder for me, but if you have say, one box with a nice thick black X in it and another with a random mark that seems obvious to me. If you have a bubble filled 100% in or even 75%+ in and another with a minor mark in it, again, not bad.
But if you have one chad “hanging” and another “deeply depressed but only slightly detached” I don’t actually know how that person wanted to vote or exactly how their ballot got that way.
I would like go believe that State Agricultural Commissioner is a less important position then President of the US.:dubious: Unless said commissioner is in charge of thousands of nukes we have not heard about.
Why the hell does the Florida State SC not get as much flack as the SCOTUS. Most of that Court did not even have the pretense of Impartiality. Within a week they got reversed…twice.
If you watched the recount on TV for any length of time, you could see how arbitrary it was. I remember watching C-Span and it was either in Broward or Palm Beach County.
There were three commissioners examining ballots. Two out of three won. Two Democrats and One Republican. The one Republican obviously leaned Bush and one Democrat seemed very fair. The other Democrat, however, didn’t see a ballot that wasn’t a Gore vote. Everything handed to her was a Gore vote. You could have handed a car tire to her and she would have seen it as a vote for Al Gore.
At one point, she declared a Gore vote and the other Democrat said something to the effect of “That wouldn’t have been a vote, even under this morning’s standards.”??? We are changing standards from morning to afternoon?
It was becoming increasingly obvious that the manual recount was just an exercise in what partisan could see a dimple next to his or her preferred candidate’s name. It would have been just as fair to flip a coin. It would have been far less legitimate to decide a Presidential race on this bullshit exercise than it would have to let the highest court in the land decide.
I’m going to throw out something that will be sure to throw the Dems into a lather: Katherine Harris had a professional and moral obligation to NOT accept the late returns.
Her role as Secretary of State was to determine the will of the Florida voters. If she had accepted the late returns from only Democratic counties (due to a stupid law that SCOFla never addresses while talking about will of the people and making sure every vote is counted) it would have skew the results. Answer this - suppose the recount found net 5000 votes for Gore. Could Harris, SCOFla, SCOTUS or you be sure that Bush would not have gotten 5000 more net votes in the other counties.
Now if there were a statewide recount and Gore were gaining more votes than Bush and so Harris refused to certify the returns then that would be clearly be partisan. But is it partisan if she follows the letter of the law (as did Gore) to avoid an unfair situation when she has an obligation to keep the election as fair as possible?
But the final decision of the FL Supremes was that a hand recount of undervotes had to be done in all counties, not just the Gore ones. (I think they waterboarded the 4th justice to get his vote and compromised on the statewide recount).
Then SCOTUS said that this was insufficient and there had to be a full recount of all votes, but there was no time to do this recount and still meet the safe harbor deadline. 5 agreed in this opinion. 2 more agreed that the FL Supremes decision was unconstitutional, but, hey, there is still time…get to work boys. 2 would have agreed with the FL Supremes.
Am I incorrect in my memory?
Why do you make that claim? The FSC had ordered a full statewide manual recount, something you’d have a hard time claiming was partisan. That’s what SCOTUS “reversed”, in your word, on the basis that Bush’s “legitimacy” as President once they’d made that happen would be damaged by any revelation that Gore had actually won. :rolleyes:
If the full statewide recount had actually been done, as the principles of democracy required, then yes, you’d know. At the minimum it could be accepted by all that everything that could be done in good faith had been done.
It would have been, if that’s what she’d done. But her goal, as Bush’s statewide campaign director as well as SS, was to have her candidate win, democracy be damned. That was also the goal of a disappointing number of SCOTUS justices, who at least had the decency to admit it in their not-a-precedent clause
I think that’s correct. Basically Florida’s SC was always in favor of a half-assed recount, first Gore requested counties and then undervotes which I believe for some reason favored Democrats and always with different and changing standards of what constituted a vote. SCOTUS stepped in and correctly said that if you are determining the will of the voters then every vote needs to be recounted by the same standard. So just like people put Harris in the “Bush win at all costs” camp we have to put SCOFla and Stevens & Ginsburg in the “Gore win at all costs” camp.
Where SCOTUS screwed up was by stopping the recounts and not coming up with a specific and fair legal ruling. I think the only two rulings that work are that the deadline was Nov. 14th and given A2S1C2 of the Constitution and given that certifying amended returns are at the SoS’s discretion that the returns as certified are the legal ones. Done! OR that provided that EVERY county has the recount done by safe harbor that those results shall be certified and it’s not SCOTUS’s or Harris’s fault that counties started so late because of the (unconstitutional) law for limited recounts or that Fla did not address the equal protection for every Floridian earlier. I know these contradict each other and that point to just what a clusterfuck the whole situation was.
And don’t get me wrong. I firmly believe that Harris saw this as an opportunity to single-handedly hand the election to Bush and that she was surprised she was not richly rewarded for her work. That being said, I believe that legally she made the correct decision in following the returns certification statute and I believe she had a moral obligation to use her discretion to ignore a law (ultimately found unconstitutional) being used unfairly. So we can blame her for making all of the right decisions for all of the wrong reasons.
So what you are saying is that SCOTUS should have stopped the whole issue in Bush v Palm beach. That was issued 9-0. Reading between the lines of that ruling I can see that SCOTUS was basically saying to the Florida SC, “what the fuck was that about?” OTH if they had simply mandated to Florida to freeze matter as they were on November 14th they might have gotten even more shit then they have historically. I think they were hoping that Florida SC might come to its senses. They did not. The result was Bush v Gore..
Out of curiosity, how different had it been if the SCOTUS had after reversing Florida 7-2 in Bush v Gore ruled differently on remedy?
Since this point keeps coming up, my recollection is that the idea that Gore might cast a wide net in his recount request came up while his team was considering its options, and that he got a lot of preemptive flak from Bush partisans for the possibility that he might embark on a ‘fishing expedition’ to change enough votes to change the outcome, and that Gore’s team responded to that criticism by tailoring their request to just those counties where they felt they could justify it.
Now my recollection might be wrong; that was a dozen years ago, after all. And no, I’m not gonna try out my Google-fu on this, since Google increasingly sucks at reaching back into the past.
But if I’m right, then criticizing Gore now for having been selective is a bit of a retrospective whipsaw.
I have never criticized Gore for being selective. That was the law at the time and he used it to his advantage. Nothing wrong with that.
I criticize whoever wrote and passed the law and SCOFla for not stopping to think that if a statewide election was so close then maybe the whole state should be recounted so the results are not skewed.
Not necessarily. I think SCOTUS should have addressed the issue instead of stopping the recounts which IIRC was after their ruling in Bush v PBCB.
Which one, the one making “the clear intent of the voter” controlling?
They DID. It was *that *ruling that SCOTUS decided had to be stopped, lest Gore be found to have won.
As a Democrat, I think I’m allowed to say that the reason undervotes favor us is that we just aren’t as good at following directions as Republicans.
We’re lovers, not fighters, yo. There are no wrong answers.