If the Bush people want a fair election why should they care if there is a recount or not.
Sunday, November 19, 2000
Battle Over Hand Recounts
George W. Bush’s lawyers have filed papers for a Monday Florida Supreme Court hearing that could determine the presidency. Bush hopes to stop hand recounts that threaten his 930-vote lead out of 6 million cast, while Gore wants the work to continue in the three heavily Democratic counties
The recount has already started. Wouldn’t it be prudent to let the Gore people have their way in this last questioned election result. It is machine error that they are looking for.Right???
The Bush people don’t want a recount because they think they might lose.
This is because they are currently leading. If the preliminary results from Florida showed Bush losing, his people would be screaming for a recount and Gore would be fighting against having one. So it’s rather pointless to argue that one side or another is trying to steal the elections – both are.
Correction! 16 of 67 counties did no recount. They simply turned on the computers and reprinted the original results. In the rest of the state, the recount reduced Bush’s unofficial lead from 1800 votes to 300 votes. And 100 of those votes came from a majority Republican county that did a full hand recount.
3% of the state’s votes were uncounted, either due to overvoting or undervoting. Those are the cards being inspected by hand. Under the eyes of both Dem & Rep observers. In the same manner as prescribed in Texas state law (except that Texas requires non-detached (i.e., pregnant or dimpled) chads to be counted.
It is unfair that recounts are being done only in a few Democratic counties. Bush’s people rolled the dice in not asking for a full statewide hand count. I expect that, should the Florida court require hand-counted votes to be added to the totals, and should they fall behind, they’ll ask for a statewide count. Gore offered that last week, and he’ll have to back it up.
Of course Gore asked for a recount in states that favored him. They asked for that over a week ago. Bush didn’t ask for one. Should he be able to now? The reason that Gore asked was voting tabulation errors.They picked three counties that the polls showed should have gone to Gore by a large majority and didn’t.Why were there so many problems in these three counties?Isn’t that what you think the reason was?
Neither side questions the accuracy of the counting machines. A vote counted by the machine is counted accurately. The arguement is over ballots that the counting machine considers invalid.
Most of the rejected ballots are from people voting for two candidates. There were 19,000 of these in one Gore county and 23,000 in one Bush county.
Gore picked three counties that voted heavily for him AND had significant ballots rejected by the counting machines. He is hoping, correctly IMHO, that if some of the machine rejected ballots can be made valid, these votes will go to him since these counties were strongly for him.
All of this is about winning the Presidential election, not voting rights. In New Mexico, Gore is leading the by less than 400 votes. In Florida, Bush is leading by less than 1000 votes. Noone is fighting a 400 vote lead representing the “will of the people” in New Mexico, because that state does not have enough electorial votes to give either the Presedential election. The less than 100 vote lead in Florida is being contested because the state does have enough electorial votes.