Election 2004: Vote Early and OftenNovember 20, 2000
Monday, October 25, 2004, 10:22 PM
NYT Headline: "Recounts Drag On; Court Battle Lines Are Drawn".
Broward County changed the way it would count votes, so that dimpled or one-corner chads would be counted as votes.
Lieberman (candidate for Veep) said that Florida election officials should reconsider tossing the hundreds of military overseas ballots rejected for various reasons including missing postmarks.
The Bush campaign asked the Florida Supreme Court to let the state reject any manual recounts finished after last Tuesday because that we the deadline in Florida law. That was the main argument in their brief filed with the court.
Vote counters started to go slowly crazy. A research analyst for the Republican National Committee said that on Friday he saw a Democratic counter eating a chad. People started putting votes in the wrong pile, from sheer exhaustion. Right outside the counting room, nonstop press conferences and live broadcasts were taking place, which means that counters were trying to do this excrutiatingly detailed task in the midst of bedlam. The room is almost soundproof but not impervious to the klieg lights used by the press to film the bedlam.
A quote from one of the front page articles, titled "An Evolving Legal Maze", subtitled "Tangled Issues and No Clear Exit":
"For a brief interval late Friday afternoon, it appeared that the electoral stalemate in Florida might finally be headed toward something approaching a definitive judicial resolution in the State Supreme Court.
Not anymore.
As lawsuits over an astonishing variety of election-related disputes proliferated around the stater, with others threatened but not yet filed, the momentary clarity provided by two court orders late Friday, both letting manual counting of ballots proceed, quickly faded.
...
But whether the state courts -- or, in fact, any court -- will have the last word is increasingly an open question. The Florida Supreme Court hearing set for Monday afternoon brings to mind Winston Churchill's assessment of a British victory in North Africa in late 1942: 'This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.' "
Just think, we're still at the *beginning* of the beginning.
§
