SCOFla ordered a full recount on December 8th and SCOTUS ordered a halt to the recount on December 9th claiming in effect that it may count non-legal votes. Bear in mind that both courts agreed that December 12 was a hard deadline.
So here are a couple issues. Gore asked for his recounts on November 9th. Why did it take Florida 30 days to decide that a full state recount was necessary? Harris did not have any statutory authority to order a state recount but SCOFla certainly could have when it ruled on November 21 on the original lawsuit. Specifically the main issue was “will of the voters”. At that point SCOFla should have used equal protection to rule that recounts determining the will of the voters in selected counties is inapplicable in a statewide election and thus application of that law in this circumstance is unconstitutional. SCOFla could then use the wide latitude it felt it had to order a full-state recount at that time allowing a full three weeks for recounts. Then the only legal issue is if Harris was obliged to accept them. I think that under those circumstances since she has already accepted Volusia county’s amended returns she would have been obligated to accept all of them (again equal protection).
Another issue: why was “safe harbor” more important than counting each vote. The actual deadline is really before they are counted by the President of the Senate so it seems strange that 3 USC 5 would be more controlling than Constitutional issues and if the intent of the Florida Legislature was to certify votes by safe harbor how all the other Legislative intents seemed to get thrown out by the various courts.
Boy, do I know what you mean! I was just thinking about that speech that Bush gave, maybe you remember it? Wherein he recognized that he lost the popular vote and only gained the WH by a legalistic maneuver, and promised to restrain himself and his party from any pretense of an actual political victory.
Google totally fails to find any reference to it! Fuckin’ Google!
The authority to order that done did not lie with the candidate.
There’s a lot of misunderstanding about what “safe harbor” meant - it was not a deadline by which everything had to be done, or else, something or other; it was only a deadline for preventing challenges. That was obviously pacing the Team Bush effort, but it needed to be given no more respect than that. IOW, your answer is simply “True”, and it means you should be condemning the partisan-activist wing of SCOTUS for opposing democracy instead of the FlSC for trying to enforce it, however they came to that position.
Absolutely, it could have been done in a few days, *given good faith *- which was never present in Bush’s brother the Governor, or state campaign manager the SecState, or cousin the Fox News election-reporting director.
Safe harbor required two things: 1) That the results be certified by December 12 and 2) That the laws in place on election day not be changed.
The FL Supremes painted themselves into a corner by agreeing that the legislature wanted to take advantage of safe harbor because it then couldn’t craft any new rules or else it would violate #2 above.
So they were in a bad situation with the “will of the voter” language. If they admitted that this was ambiguous, then they would have to craft a new rule, violating safe harbor. But by standing by the ambiguous rule, they left themselves open to attack that they had really set down no meaningful standard by which to recount the votes: and they hadn’t.
But in our legal system, the same law at least theoretically applies to both great and small.
You’ll have to support your claim about the partiality of the FL supreme court. But as for the rest of it, getting reversed by a biased court isn’t evidence of lack of impartiality themselves.
Megan McArdle runs through a bunch of counterfactuals about the 2000 Florida recount here and here. Obviously, she comes at this from the right, but there are elements in her analysis for both sides not to like.
Nope. Article 2, Section 1, Clause 2 does not apply to the election of County Dogcatcher and at least for SCOTUS, that part of the Constitution was a major factor of the case.
I still wonder how a state’s Secretary of State, charged with running elections, can be one candidate’s official campaign manager in that state. Isn’t that a huge conflict of interest?
Both John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O’Connor have been speaking recently about how granting certiorari was a mistake in the first place. Of course, Stevens had been against it from the beginning.
ETA: If all the SoS had to do was count votes, there wouldn’t have been a controversy to begin with.
It is, but they don’t care. Harris’ job was to deliver the state for Bush. It seems to me that ideally there should be a bipartisan commission in charge of running elections that directs the Secretary of State how to act.
No, that was never a deadline after which, well, something unspecified could or could not have happened. The real deadline was January 20, and even that is a little soft. We’ve had elections go to the House before and could have done it again, worst case.
Nor could they, nor were they required to. That, including the “hanging chad” crap etc., was an obstructive. stalling excuse by the party whose interests lay in preventing anything that might possibly have led to Bush losing, by its antidemocracy agents in the FL state government and SCOTUS, and by its antidemocracy partisan excusemakers. You’re not helping your position for blaming the *target *of a bogus attack instead the attackers for it.
All the “clear intent of the voter” standard required was good faith by the counters, derived from fundamental respect for democracy. The lack of *that *was the problem, and continues to be reflected in distressingly many other ways even today.
I would argue that “will of the voter” needs a standard. Is it fair that if I left a hnging chad in Volusia County it would count as a vote but in Palm Beach it would not?
The problem being, as you point out, the antidemocratic partisans would, and did, yelp about “changing the rules” at the very mention of it. And that isn’t any court’s fault, so your criticism of them is off-target.
Got any suggestions for a resolution of that problem?
That’s an illustration of one of the most blatanly dishonest parts of the SCOTUS ruling. Varying levels of violation of equal protection, created by those varying technologies and varying standards, by definition *require *varying degrees of remedy. Yet SCOTUS ruled that those varying degrees of remedy were the EP problem in themselves, without reflecting why they were varying in the first place.
The ruling did establish, correctly of course, that equal protection rights cover voting. But the principle was perverted in that only case the ruling was allowed to apply to. That hasn’t been, and won’t ever be, vindicated by time.
You might want to clarify what you mean by ‘clause 2’ of Article 2, Section 1. My copy of the Constitution doesn’t break Article 2, Section 1 down into smaller units, other than the usual grammatical stuff of sentences and paragraphs.
Unless you take a clause to be a major part of a sentence, in which case “in a President of the United States of America” seems to be the closest thing. I don’t know how much weight the Supremes put on “in a President of the United States of America” but I hope it wasn’t much.
And nether Sentence 2 nor Paragraph 2 of Article 2, Section 1 seem to be any more relevant than that.
ETA: Having just read Article 2, Section 1 all the way through (excluding the parts voided by amendments), I can’t see anything relevant. Not of debatable persuasiveness, just not anything seemingly relevant.
Uh, is this a whoosh? Didn’t Florida in 2000 show everybody in the world that counting votes is *not *easy? We still don’t know who had the most votes, and never will.
There’s a huge conflict of interest when someone who’s in charge of running the election is the campaign manager for one of the candidates.
Do you think there was no conflict of interest even though Republican lobbyists were advising the secretary of state?