From the Washington Post (who are in turn quoting the Orlando Sentinel).
Despite all of the media spin to the contrary, It is likely that if SCOTUS had allowed the recount to go forward the overvotes AND the undervotes would have been hand counted. Thereby giving the victory to Gore.
[sub]are you listening Rhenquist, Scalia? This will be what people 100 years ago remember about your time in the supreme court.[/sub]
[sub] While Democrats are busy mooning over the past, Republicans will win elections in the future. Shhhh. Don’t wake them up… ;)[/sub]
december: Shhhh. Don’t wake them up…
Too late!
I can’t recall off the top of my head, but I don’t seem to recall any provision in Florida Law that would have allowed a ballot with more than one candidate marked to be counted. I also don’t recall any County Canvassing Boards intending to accept overvotes, and I believe that they were the ones who decided on the standards in each county.
The ones that could be counted are the ones that have a checkmark for a candidate, and also a check for ‘write in’ that has the candidates name.
You wouldn’t think that there would be all that many of these, but apparently there were enough. I hadn’t intended to defend the idea that a full count of overvotes would have given Gore the lead because that fact has been so widely reported.
Overvotes, optical ballots key
They never let you get away with anything here 
Tejota, please be more straighforward when quoting sources. Here’s the part you felt was better represented by several dots:
Furthermore, the article also notes, at the end
Additionally, in the Sentinal article it says
So there’s three ifs involved
Perhaps a lawyer can correct me, but my impression is that judges tend to be very circumspect when commenting about what they might or might not do or have done. The fact that Lewis said he would have been “open to that” means little IMHO.
With regards to this:
Check out the article: [Court-ordered recount was guessing game
Florida’s election rules were so inconsistent that no result would have been reliable](http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/orl-asecrecount12111201nov12.story?coll=orl-home-headlines).
Worth reading, for some people.
All he needed was evidence that there were valid votes in the overvotes, he had the power to expand, and the evidence existed.
Dec 12 is the same bogus ‘deadline’ that SCOTUS used as an excuse to stop the counting. If the counting had gone beyond then, it would have been a circus, but that hardly gives that date the force of law.
Dec 12 is the date that prohibits Congress from challenging the states’ delegation out of hand, nothing more. Even in 2000, some of the states sent the delegations to congress later than that.
It would have taken more balls than our collective congress contains to refuse to seat the Florida delegates in full view of the world so long as it happened before the delegates formally vote.
Only one if, 1. is implied by 2., no fair upping your count by paraphrasing yourself. If he decided counting overvotes was justified then he naturally would have ordered it so. It was precisely his power to decide how the counting would be done, and NOT the local boards at that point in the game.
Point 3. is non-issue, Dec 12 was a false deadline, convenient if they were done before then, but not necessary.
The actual deadline was in January, which was easily doable.
On the contrary, that he said even that much speaks volumes. Circumspect would be if he refused to discuss the case.
It’s quite clear that only undervotes were being recounted. Not a single canvassing board was looking at overvotes and it’s highly doubtful Lewis would change that before his deadline. So at 2 p.m. Sunday, with all the undervotes counted, we find that Bush’s lead has increased (according to the study upon which this thread is based).
So how does the overvote count occur?
If Judge Lewis orders it, he appears partisan.
If the Gore team requests it, they look like sore losers. Plus they didn’t argue the overvote question when the vote difference was smaller.
If Lewis did somehow decide the overvotes should be counted, his decision would be immmediately appealed to the Florida Supreme Court. The justices would then be in the unenviable position of overruling their own decision on how the recount should occur. They would have to order a recount of votes that they considered unneccessary a few days earlier when the election was actually closer.
Likely? Not very.
Factual statement or guess?
The software you refer to was used in punch card jurisdictions with central tabulation which isn’t where the overvotes were. Optical scan counties had existing software that spit out any ballot which did not register a vote so the overvoted ballots would have been segregated as well. They were being noticed at the time. I recall reports prior to the count being shut down that they were being noticed. In one county where the count had been complete they gave a number for the valid overvoted ballots found which would not be included in the count under existing rules. Clearly someone had kept track.
You think it would be partisan to count valid votes? More partisan than the republican county that just decided that the automatic recount was wrong without reexamining the ballots perhaps? I don’t know how Lewis could have ignored legal votes that were uncovered during the count.
Aparently you didn’t read all of the OP. I’ll quote a bit again so you can be sure to see it
It happens because Bush is asking for it (mostly to stall, I believe, but that’s neither here nor there). And because evidence was even then becoming available that at lease 1 opscan county (collier as I recall) had already looked at their overvotes and found valid votes there. The combination of the two factors would have forced Lewis to consider the overvotes, and as soon as he looked at them, he would be forced to conclude that they should be counted.
Sure, if Bush wanted to continue his campaign of obstruction. But since my thesis is that the SC decided the election by stopping the count, this merely supports argument.
You’re ignoring the crucial fact that the recount was already in progress. Only votes from the undercount were being examined. The author may speculate that Bush would have urged an overvote recount, but that’s highly doubtful.
The Bush team had fought every previous recount attempt. It would have been politically compromising for them to ask for one of their own. They would have had to been in a dire situation to do so. Dire circumstances would not have arisen since they would have been aware of how the undervote count was proceeding.
Once the undervote recount started, the only thing that could have stopped it was the Supreme Court. If they hadn’t intervened, at 2 p.m. Sunday would have left Bush in the lead and no one in a position to ask for another recount.
Again, I don’t think this follows. He may not have decided to expand the recount beyond what was ordered by the FSC, and may not have chosen to intervene in the local election boards, even if he personally thought it was a good idea to count them (recall: this is the same guy who had previously ruled that Katherine Harris had properly excercised her discretion in stopping the original recounts, until he was overruled by the FSC).
This may have been theoretically so, but does not necessarily reflect reality. Fact is that the recounts had already begun, and Lewis had not imposed a uniform standard - actually he pretty much left each board on their own.
This is irrelevant. All sides at that point had accepted that the recount had to be completed by that point (due to the “safe harbor” issue), including the FSC. I recall this quite distinctly. The fact that the opinion of Tejota differs is irrelevant.
Well I think circumspect is when you say that you would consider everything, and rule nothing out. YMMV.
One of the hallmarks of Anglo-American jurisprudence is something called the “rule of law.” What this means, quite simply, is that we choose (directly by electing or indirectly by elected representatives appointing) judges, with tiers of appeal authority, we submit our disputes to them instead of staging rebellions or coups d’etat, and we accept their decisions as final. Unless enough of us get irked about them, as in Chisholm v. Georgia, Scott v. Sandford, and Pollock v. Farmers Trust & Loan, when we amend the Constitution to say how we feel it should have come out.
At this point, and since about November 20, 2000, there is absolutely nothing that anybody can say or do which will make a substantial majority of the country happy with Presidential Election 2000. There will always be a substantial amount of people saying “Bush stole the election from Gore” or “Gore tried to steal the election from Bush.” And, whichever side you fall on, you have to admit that the other side does have a point. Which, at bottom line, means that the problem is insoluble.
A quick comment to those who say that machines will be more accurate than honest humans: I presume you will pay up without complaint the $5,000 Straight Dope users fee that was generated because some poor minimum-wage clerk at the Chicago Reader forgot to type in the decimal point on 12,000+ $50 fees (supposing that is what the fee is when it’s imposed), and the machine did not use common sense to realize that that was the wrong charge.
I consider that anything other than finding out what the results would have been if recounts had been completed under differing vote-acceptance scenarios, as a historical exercise, is simply continuing to beat a dead horse.
It strikes me that the appropriate thing to do at this point is to ensure that every jurisdiction has equipment and procedures in place to prevent any recurrence of this, and to consider whether we want to add Bush v. Gore to the list of SCOTUS cases resulting in Constitutional amendments by abolishing or reforming the Electoral College and/or how it’s chosen.
This thread isn’t really about what did happen or what should have happened or what should happen in the future. The assertion being debated is that Gore would have been elected had the Supreme Court not stopped the recount. We’re trying to determine whether this is a 100% certainty (thread title), or more than a 50% certainty (OP).
[hijack]
A clerk makes an error and we’ll blame it on the machine. Gotcha.
[/hijack]
Polycarp is exactly correct.
However, I’ve come to the reluctant conclusion that no smattering of logic - or, indeed, torrent thereof - will sway the people who wish to endlessly debate this.
Unfortunately, I feel that vital attention is being siphoned from the “how do we prevent it from happening again?” question by the “Look, look, look what happened!” crowd.
What are you doing to assure that Florida 2000 is not repeated in your state?
Fort Marcy: Something of my point. There were people in Palm Beach County who averred in sworn statements that they had erroneously punched Buchanan instead of Gore due to the butterfly ballot, and rather than being given replacement ballots as mandated by Florida state law, were told to punch Gore as well and circle the response they meant, and election judges would read their ballots as votes for Gore.
Given that information, how would a machine read that ballot? How would an election judge being duly apprised of the facts as stated above?
I don’t blame the machine. I suggest that human fallibility is best corrected by human common sense, not blind faith in machinery.
Out of curiosity–would it have been in Judge Terry Lewis’s authority to reexamine the absentee military ballots as well and to throw out the dubious military ballots? Indeed, if Judge Lewis could have determined the validity of both overvotes and undervotes, then could he have also given himself the ability to determine the validity of overseas military ballots?
I apologize if my question above is stupid, but I am simply curious about this; after all, if the U.S. Supreme Court would have refused to hear the Bush v. Gore case, then a statewide manual hand recount of both undervotes and overvotes, plus a rejection of the approximately 290 dubious military absentee ballots, should have resulted in Gore winning Florida in 2000 by a margin of between 350 and 450 votes.
Anyway, any thoughts on this?
Out of curiosity–couldn’t such a move on Judge Lewis’s part have caused either the Florida Supreme Court to overrule Lewis or to have the U.S. Supreme Court overrule both Lewis and the Florida Supreme Court (if it would have supported Lewis)? After all, couldn’t the U.S. Supreme Court argue (using some fancy legalistic wording, obviously) that the Florida recounts should be stopped due to the fact that Florida Supreme Court was changing its recount rules in the “middle of the game”?
Any thoughts on this?
Wasn’t the actual deadline before the Electoral College met, though?