Election 2004: Vote Early and OftenNovember 26, 2000
Sunday, October 31, 2004, 05:06 PM
NYT Headline: "With Deadline Near, Florida Recount Grinds On".
How to reduce lawsuits while multiplying them:
"After bludgeoning Democrats in the court of public opinion for a week with accusations that they had tried to disqualify overseas military ballots, Republicans abruptly withdrew one suit over the ballots form a court of law today before filing four new ones."
They decided to file in each of several counties over the military (overseas) ballots. The dropped the suit in Leon County because it looked like the ruling might go against them; this suit would have covered all relevant counties in Florida.
Here's what the numbers looked like, after Broward County finished its recount:
Official Bush lead: 930
Broward County: gain of 567 for Gore
Palm Beach County: gain of 10 for Bush
Additional overseas ballots: gain of 45 for Bush
Miami-Dade "sample" recount: gain of 6 for Gore
Nassau County revision: gain of 52 for Bush
Grand total: Bush lead now cut down to 464 votes.
Demonstrators not only gathered at the reocunt sites but at Gore's Washington residence, in two camps, separated by police.
There was talk of reform of the system, yet again. Here are some of the proposals:
Eliminate same-day voter registration in Wisconsin, where there was evidence that aome college students voted twice/
In Illinois and New Jersey, where Gore won handily, Republican state legislators were going to introduce bills that would allocate electoral votes proportional to the popular vote.
In Connecticut, old lever machines would be replaced by electronic voting machines.
In Washington State, laws would be introduced to allow some absentee ballots to be counted before election day, and some form of Internet-based voting qould be allowed as well.
In Florida, there would be one statewide ballot. Oh well, there's always the next election.
In Florida, 8 Republicans and 6 Democrats from the Florida Legislature were assigned to look into "voting irregularities" in Florida. Which irregularities those were, depended on which party the committee memebr belonged to.
Also in Florida, we learned that the elections supervisor in Seminole County who let Republican Party workers correct thousands of absentee ballots, the two workers were left in the office unsupervised, for around 10 days. We also learn that the supervisor only knew the name of one of the workers. The other guy just showed up one day in tow of the person she knew; she never bothered to find out who he was.
An editorial is the Week In Review section was titled "Once Again, America Needs to Believe in Its Courts." It opened this way:
"At least no one will call the United States Supreme Court a banana jury. Not yet, anyway."
(Apparently some Bush aides described the Florida Supreme Court that way, off-camera.)
And it continued:
"So the United States Supreme Court's announcement promised, intentionally or not, to put the imprimatur of a sound, impartial institution on what would otherwise be a dubious victory for either candidate. But the court is also taking a risk, counting on the respect it commands to ward off the brush that has tarred every other institution in this battle."
Maybe it's good to outgrow beliefs that don't reflect the real world. Painful? Yes, but necessary before real change can begin.
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