This article in Slate by Michael Kinsley (like Chris Matthews, a Democrat with a low BS tolerance) describes what he calls “the most outrageous Bush argument yet”–the argument that since the vote is now certified, Gore is wrong to continue his challenges.
Discuss.
Dr. J
Dr. J:
I completely agree with Kinley’s assessment.
I don’t hear too many people, however, saying Gore should concede because he doesn’t have a legal right to contest the election result.
And it isn’t incumbent upon the Bush camp to take extraordinary measures to help the Gore camp overturn the Texas Governor’s victory. Such as speeding up the judicial process (giving themselves less time to prepare); allowing ballot counts to begin before the judge has determined whether they should be recounted, who should count them and what standards should be used; etc.
Milo, this is pretty dishonest. You may have standards, but they aren’t evident in your posts. Well, one standard: any spin that the Bush camp pushes, you will soon after begin to parrot on this board. Go peddle your rhetorical nonsense somewhere else, we aren’t buying.
Now to the meat.
Harris’s office is NOT normally open on Sundays. She opened it on Sunday specifically to make Palm Beach county’s canvassing board’s job more difficult.
The Supreme court gave her this option, and she took it. The fact that it allowed her to discard Palm Beach’s hand count was a bonus. No, she didn’t break any laws. Yes she made herself (and Bush by association) look like an asshole. This action did nothing but damage to Bush. The lady really isn’t very savy.
By the way, am I pissed about her behavior? Not really, the only real effect of her decision was to add ammunition to the Gore lawsuit and give the Democrats in Congress a little more resolve.
By the way, did you see her press conference? She was smirking the whole time. Not smart.
tj
and in here I quoted what your governor Engler said 10 days ago, a veritible fountain of impartiality. John Engler: “where a general election could be taken away right before our eyes. So there is that sense of fear that the Gore team is so insidious that they could actually steal this in front of the whole nation.” (quoted from the governor’s conference 11/18/00)
No, she went in on Sunday because that was the deadline the S.C. gave. Had they made it Tuesday at 2:18am, I’m sure she would have been there then. Because, and this should come as no surprise to you, she wanted to CERTIFY the election the earliest possible moment after the injunction was lifted.
Perhaps she was “smirking” because the S.C. LAMBASTED her for following the letter of the law and not the “spirit” of the law. As a remedy, they set up an arbitrary deadline…which was more “fair” because it allowed time for a recount but recognized that the whole freaking nation was patiently waiting for the results. And, of course, PBC couldn’t meet the deadline and MD wouldn’t meet it. Which now puts the S.C. in the position of either: 1) Criticizing Harris again…for strictly following THEIR laws (And it said SUNDAY); or 2) Eating crow.
Palm Beach County, BTW, would have finished the re-count had they chosen to work on Thanksgiving. They didn’t and they missed the deadline. Whose fault is that?
Just one note: Michigan’s Governor Engler can say what he said about the recount because Michigan’s election statutes don’t allow the counting of dimpled chads. According to a story in today’s The (Toledo) Blade, Michigan’s election law requires that the chad have at least two detached corners to be counted. The issue is raised because there is a manual recount request in the congressional district that victorious senatorial candidate Debbie Stabenow vacated, where the margin of victory is 157 votes. So, you see, it is easy for Governor Engler to complain that Broward County was doing something Michigan would never do. It isn’t because there was something wrong with what Broward County did, or because Michigan’s counters would be inherently ‘smarter’ about how to go about the counting; it’s simply that the law wouldn’t permit discussion of the dimpled chads in Michigan.
One other comment, regarding the Sunday deadline:
The Supreme Court of Florida allowed Ms. Harris to open her office to receive election results on Sunday. That she did so is hardly surprising. And, as I have noted, the reason the FSC set this date could have been petty vindictivness (“let’s make her come in on a Sunday. She won’t like that…”), or it could have been an attempt to make sure the challenges had that much more time to be completed before Dec. 18. You can’t blame her for accepting the offer of the Court to let her receive the votes at that time. Once she was open on that date, the 5 pm deadline was court mandated; Palm Beach County was just simply STUPID not to do what it took to complete the count in a timely fashion.
Nevertheless, Ms. Harris did not HAVE to open the office on Sunday, and she certainly had plenty of advance warning one or more of the recounting counties would have trouble meeting the Sunday deadline. If her decision was about being fair and open-minded, about being reasonable, she could have simply taken the results in Monday morning. Her decision to come in on Sunday wasn’t mandatory, it was a calculated political decision to take all the latitude the FSC allowed her. This isn’t surprising; NO one in this silliness is acting with much reason, with the possible exception of the Palm Beach County canvassing board, which reasonably decided not to count all dimpled ballots, a decision quite at odds with the supposed political goal of providing as many votes for Mr. Gore as possible.
You are confusing two issues. The recount that is provided for by law that you refer to is not a manual recount. There is an additional law which does allow for a candidate to request a sample manual recount in four counties, and a subsequent full manual recount if significant discrepancies are uncovered. According to the authors of this law (both Republican and Democrat) this feature was provided in for the event of a machine breakdown or the like. So there no assumption of an inherently greater accuracy for manual recounts.
Maybe so, but you were claiming that the contester had to prove greater accuracy before requesting the manual recount. That does not seem to be the case.
“Significant discrepancies” are enough, and where the margin is gnat’-eyelash thin, almost any discrepancy would be “significant” anyway.
To the contrary; almost EVERYONE is acting with complete reason. The reason is, of course, getting their own candidate elected. There’s no real question about that being true in Harris’ case, is it?
What concerns me most is how this will all look in the history books. There’s no way to avoid observing that Bush’s election, if it’s final, was arranged by his own state campaign chairperson, acting in his favor at every opportunity. The other stuff pales in comparison. Will that look any more legitimate than the partisan commission that put Hayes in office over Tilden?
It is totally disingenuous of legislators to suggest manual recounts are provided for only when there is some problem with the machines conducting vote tabulation. For one thing, virtually every state’s elections code allows for manual recounts, and as far as I’ve been able to tell by sampling a fair number of them, almost none of these provisions requires someone requesting a manual recount to prove any error on the part of the machines. In short, these provisions exist because of one simple human quality: distrust of machines. As I’ve noted elsewhere in this thread, the machine recounts were quite inaccurate, if by accurate one means that they replicated their first result.
As for whether the fact that manual recounts are allowed establishes that they are considered at least as accurate as machine tabulation, it should be noted that manual recounts are, in all cases, the final method of arbitrating who got what votes; they don’t get followed by some attempt to confirm the accuracy of the manual recount through machine sampling. Pretty clear from this that manual recounts are considered at least as accurate under the law.
Allow me to clarify.
Let’s assume that Gore was entitled to request his manual recounts on the basis of the fact that the margin made any discrepancy significant. He has already done so. That is no longer the issue. When I said that “in order for Gore to force a recount, he must demonstrate that the recount is more accurate”, I was referring to the present state of affairs, in which Gore can no longer call upon the prevision in the law that allows him to call for manual recounts. He is now seeking to contest the election results and substitute his own, under a completely different provision in the law, that allows him to do so if he can show that the certified results are not accurate. In order to do this, he must show that his proposed method of counting in inherently more accurate than the one used so far.
On Another Front
What does everyone think about the fact that the Florida SC was evidently misled by the Gore attorneys, for whom they had such great fondness, regarding the ruling on dimpled ballots by the Illinois Supreme Court. This from the Chicago Tribune
hey Izzy, remember those ballot requests in Seminole County, where you said “the Dems were afforded the same opportunity”? heres’ more:
Seminole case
Seems that:
Each party had printed and sent to it’s own constituants, absentee ballot requests.
For whatever reason, 80% of the ones the republicans sent did not have the required voter ID # printed on the envelope. Approximately 4000 of the 14,000 absentee ballots cast had been set aside for destruction because they lacked that essential, required piece of information. (this was required under a reform law arising out of massive absentee ballot fraud in prior FL elections)
Instead of destroying those ballot requests, the county Supervisor was contacted by the GOP, and agreed to allow GOP reps to come in and add the required numbers to the ballot requests. The Dems state that they were never notified of these arrangements, and never offered an opportunity to ‘correct’ any potential ballots (if there had been any)
The ‘corrected’ ballot requests were honored, instead of being destryed.
Florida law allows that only the voter, their immediate relative or legal guardian can assist in filling these out.
wring,
I do not recall having said that the “Dems were accorded the same opportunity”. You (or someone) said that the Dems were not accorded the same opportunity, and I disagreed with the implications of this, pointing out that (according to the woman who did it) the Dems never asked for it. Your post seems to confirm that it was the GOP who took the initiative in this matter, not the election official, while the Democrats were merely “never notified” about it.
BTW, the more I think about it, the more I think this will be another legal dead end for Gore. Besides for the issue of whether an illegally filled out ballot should disqualify an otherwise valid ballot, there is the problem of identifying which ballots resulted from illegal applications and which did not. Apparently, the Democrat lawsuit recognizes this problem, and is asking to have all absentee ballots in this county thrown out, just to make sure these particular ones are. The idea of disenfranchising thousands of perfectly legitimate voters merely because some other voters failed to fill out their applications properly seems like quite a stretch to me. I would be very surprised if this panned out. But I’m no lawyer…
Finally, I’d like to offer some thoughts on the ongoing challenges:
Butterfly ballots: Florida case law on election irregularities allows the successful challenge in non-fraudulent cases only where there is ‘substantial noncompliance’ with elections law that raises reasonable doubt that the result represents the actual will of the voters (Beckstrom v. Volusia County Canvassing Board, 707 So. 2d 720 (Fla. 1998)). Here, there is no showing that there was substantial noncompliance. Contrary to statements made right after the election by those who were asserting irregularities, Florida law does not require that the ballots in question have the names to the left of the arrows. And, while one can try to argue that the interleaving of arrows from the right with arrows from the left violated the provisions requiring that the order of names be in accordance with Florida’s last gubernatorial election, the printed part of the ballot complied with that law, and there is no indication in the law that the ballot itself had to have the HOLES in that order. This one is an example of good intentions producing a bad result because they didn’t do any testing of the idea; using it in a Presidential election was a BIG mistake, likely to cost Ms. LePore her job at the next election. No go on the challenge, though.
Seminole County absentee ballots: Here, there apparently WAS substantial noncompliance with the law. To review: both parties mailed out to their members in Seminole County forms to request absentee ballots. The Republican form (at least) did not include a space for the voter’s identification number (or failed to instruct them to insert it on the form). Thousands of requests for absentee ballots were received by the county elections office without the requisite ID number. The elections officer allowed Republican party members to use a back room of the office to review county registration records to fill in these ID numbers on roughly 4,700 requests. These requestors were then sent absentee ballots they otherwise would not have received. This violates Florida law.
However, the trouble with this challenge is that it doesn’t show that the result in the county didn’t reflect the will of the voters. Presumably, had the 4,700 absentee ballots not been sent out, the voters could have simply shown up at the polling place and voted in person. And even if the ballots shouldn’t have been mailed to the voters in question, once having BEEN mailed, denying them the right to use those ballots to vote would be precisely the ‘hypertechnical’ application of the law that Beckstrom and Palm Beach County Canvassing Board v. Harris decry when used to disenfranchise voters. Like Beckstrom, no harm, therefor no successful challenge.
The retroactive application of a liberal standard here provides a practical problem: would it be possible to count the disputed dimpled chads before the Dec. 12 federal deadline? The court hearing this challenge won’t even begin to hear argument on this issue, let alone evidence, until Dec. 2. Further, there is expert opinion that differs as to what actually should be counted, as evidenced by the fact Michigan, Texas and other states can’t agree among themselves what should count. Florida courts have been aggressive in defending the voters from disenfranchisement, but might well decide here to allow the county canvassing boards, in the absence of state law, to set their own counting standards. This, from a non-partisan viewpoint makes no sense; in a statewide election, all the state’s votes should be tabulated under the same rules. Prediction: no completion of counting dimpled chads before Dec. 12.
Nevertheless, the challenge here is a sticky issue of legality versus practicality. Florida Statutes Section 102.166(4)© allows a county canvassing board to conduct a manual canvass of selected precints when an official manual recount request is received. Interestingly, the canvassing board is not required to conduct the sampling; it is in their discretion. However, once the sampling is done, Section 102.166(5) says:
In the case of Dade County, in order to have started the complete manual recount, the board had to have determined that the conditions of Section 102.166(5) existed, and at that point, the law doesn’t allow the board any discretion on completing the recount. They become obligated to either fix what is wrong with the machines that resulted in improper counting and complete the tabulation with the fixed machines, or they have to complete the manual recount of all the ballots. Therefore, the decision by the Dade County board to suspend the recount and revert to the machine recount was illegal.
On the other hand, clearly Dade County was not going to complete their recount with the resources they were using by the deadline set by the Supreme Court. The completion of that recount would have been an exercise in futility. Can they now be required to complete that recount, since it appears that 102.166(5) was determined to apply? Frankly, this one has the best chance of being granted, although the best opposing argument is to assert that the conditions of 102.166(5) didn’t apply, making it uneccessary to complete the recount. Given that there is a report that the gap between the two candidates narrowed by at least 150 votes with some 25% of ballots counted, that argument might not be too compelling, though.
From a non-partisan viewpoint, strictly accepting that the determination of the board was accurate, and that a manual recount was needed, this county’s recount should be completed. But, what then about the deadline of Sunday? If you set a deadline, and a county misses it, how valid is that deadline if a county can continue to count after the deadline and have the votes accepted after a challenge? I can’t wait to see how the Florida Supreme Court handles THAT particular conundrum…
[fixed annoying underline. --Gaudere}
[Edited by Gaudere on 11-30-2000 at 04:54 PM]
oops. /u<------ put in in as needed 
make that “an illegally filled out application”. Sorry.
Re the Seminole Cy. arguably-illegal absentee ballots:
I can’t find the cite in all the blizzard of stories about this, but I do recall reading that there is a precedent - some Congressional election in Alabama in the 80’s, I believe. The US district court found such widespread illegality in absentee ballots, and no effective way to separate the legal from illegal ones, that he threw all of them out and reversed the result. With no appellate review, that makes the case a precedent.
If that’s truly an applicable precedent, then it would be difficult for the Seminole judge to go the other way, wouldn’t it?
(Insert standard IANAL disclaimer here)
“merely not notified” that some 4000+ ballot requests were being handled contrary to Florida law? Seeing the next thoughtful and unpartisan response from the esteemed esquire I can see his reasoning about that - except :
Had the dems been notified of this when it was happening, they could have challenged it then as potentially being contrary to FL law. They were not able to challenge it at the time because they were not notified. To allow one party access where access was specifically allowed only by “individual voter, their immediate family and/or legal guardian” was wrong.
Perhaps the voters may have chosen to go vote personally in November, however, it is not correct to assume that they would have voted the same. (I personally once voted by absentee ballot, sent it in, but changed my mind afterwards). It’s also not correct to assume the same number of people would have gone to the polls as ballots sent out.
Remedy at this point? let the judges and lawyers figure that out.
The problem with this argument is that it assumes a linear relationship that is not true. Many (including the Orlando Sentinal have pointed out that the Miami-Dade recounted the heavily Democratic precincts first (and, ultimately, no others).
I would think this fact also argues against allowing the partial recount from M-D into the final tally.