I was watching MSNBC or Fox New Channel a couple of nights ago and I heard a couple of people agree that 4 pro-Bush Florida counties actually did a machine vote and then a hand vote, and then certified the one with the higher total for Bush. They stated it non-chalantly but, if true, it sounds pretty fraudulent. So does anyone know if this is true? If so, why weren’t the Dems up in arms about it?
One thing we discovered in Election 2000 is that Florida Election Law is extremely vague. They seem to give a lot of power to individual counties to decide their rules. Of course the US Supreme Court states that letting individual counties decide is in violation of the equal protection statute, where all votes need to be counted in the same manner.
So one of the first actions of the new Florida State Legislature is to patch up their election laws so that they can clearly determine a winner. Using ambiguous words like “intent of the voter” only provide to confuse.
In this Florida contest, the Gore campaign picked its battles carefully. You can blitz the Florida legal system with every problem in this election; there simply aren’t enough lawyers. The truth is you need to look at those pro-Bush counties and figure out just how many votes are in question? Is it enough to win the election, if not efforts are better spent on other arguments.
They are up in arms about all counties where Bush won.
I believe this was the automatic recount, not the manual count. The county board of elections basically said the recount showed Bush still won so there was no reason to change their certification.
The democratic counties may have done the same thing. It is the county election boards, not the republicians or democrates who certify the vote.
"If so, why weren’t the Dems up in arms about it? "
They were, and got a remedy from the Florida supreme court. The U.S. supreme court then told them to go suck some eggs.
I think that sucking eggs isn’t a rememedy. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case. The Dems didn’t get ANY rememdy from the lower court(s).
For some reason, I couldn’t type “remedy” correctly above. My apologeez.