Apologies in advance if this is a case of stupid-newbie-rehashing-existing-thread: I admit, I haven’t had a chance to read through all the (many) election threads, but I’ve seen a couple people mention some different things in many of them. So to get it all aired out and and addressed in one place:
How much substance is there to the claim of Republicans fixing the Presidential election? We’ve all heard plenty of claims abouts “Gore’s election theft”, how about “Bush’s election fraud”? What’s the deal with the felon thing and the absentee ballot serial numbers? Y’all strike me as smart folks, so what’s the real scoop here?
I’m particularly fond of the republicans use of absentee ballots to send in more votes after the election turned out to be too close on the 7th. The courts let them count them if they got in by the 17th, even with no postmark.
Indications of illegality are OK, but the intent has got to machine readable. Oh, no, wait, these are absentee ballots, they ALL got the “human look” that the court ruled unconstitutional for punchcard ballots.
Do you ever stop and actually THINK about what you are writing? Do you ever hit the PREVIEW button before you post and read your post to make sure it makes sense?
Who cares if someone got two absentee ballots? There is a whole procedure when an absentee ballot is recieved where they make sure this is the only vote from that person.
I don’t see you upset about the 1000 or so military ballots that got thrown out.
I can only think of 2 things that might be construed as fraud:
The folks who illegally filled out the ballot applications in Seminole and Martin County. The judges both ruled that their actions were illegal, but that they weren’t “illegal” enough to warrant throwing out the ballots.
Katherine Harris ordered Palm Beach County to stop counting the Sunday after the election, and then tried to refuse their counts because they were “late”. This was my favorite part of this.
The rest of the mess just seems to have been caused by incompetence.
Gore tried to get what he was entitled to under Florida Law, Bush tried to stop this by claiming that parts of Florida’s election laws were unconstitutional. Bush won this argument, ultimately, after following a long and winding road. Florida’s Legislature really dropped the ball on this with their confusing and contradictory statutes.
As for absentee ballots . . .
Many were thrown out because of a “technicality,” that is, they were filled out wrong. Many ballots were mis-counted because of a “technicality,” they were not machine readable. Both situations I believe that one could argue that both of these situations are “wrong,” but not one over the other. Both may boil down to people not following directions.
Republicans: “If you’re too stupid to follow the direcitons your vote shouldn’t count! unless it’s absentee.”
Democrats: “If you’re too stupid to follow the directions your vote shouldn’t count count! unless it’s in Palm Beach or Miami County.”
No body could possibly have believed that the election would have been this close. Our perspective has gotten forshortened because we have become used to thinking of 1,000 votes out of 9 million as a “lead”.
Harris and Co. farmed out the contract on the voter list purging, to people with very cozy ties to the Right. But thats more likely nepotism and cronyism than actual conspiracy. Nobody could have guessed that screwing a couple thousand voters out of their ballot would actually make the difference. Gore got shafted by an amazing string of circumstances.
Top of the line? Ralph “Mouth” Nader. Anybody want to start a collection to buy him a Corvair for Christmas?