Recess appointment, anyone?
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 10:12 AM
I was trying to convince a family member that a recess appointment to the Supreme Court is perfectly legal -- and after all, that's how Earl Warren got on the Court -- but he wasn't buying it. Maybe this article will convince him. It describes talk amongst administration officials about doing just that, should Rehnquist not be able to resume his duties after all. All very hush-hush, given the election, of course.

We probably have too many lawyers and judges involved in this mess already. But what we don't have is enough poll workers; we're short by about half a million nationwide. What happens when there aren't enough qualified volunteers?

"As long as they're breathing and they can walk in, we have to take them," says Barbara Jackson, Baltimore's director of elections. "The people we hire for the most part are elderly, undereducated, and frequently unemployed."

Another thing we're short on is absentee ballots arriving in the mail on time in Broward County. "Your ballot is in the mail" now joins the top ten things not to believe from a government official. That's about 58,000 folks who are wondering how they are going to vote. Enough to swing Florida?

At first I thought the absentee ballot story was on a parody site, since the other headlines included Man Accused Of Trying To Run Over Katherine Harris, (yes, *that* Katherine Harris), and right below that, Fishing Trip Unearths Mammoth Tooth, Other Fossils, but on second look it appears to be legit. Maybe they just have weirder news down there in Florida.


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November 21, 2000
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 01:07 AM
NYT Headline: "Florida's Justices Zero In on Recount Deadlines".

I saw this oral argument live, on C-SPAN, though I can't remember now whether it was via Internet feed or on TV. I think it must have been Internet feed because I was most likely at work, not working, and distracting everyone else on the floor with the broadcast. Well, hell, it was an easy time to be distracted, with history in the making. C-SPAN must have gotten banner ratings that quarter.

Geez, I'm just too tired to try to dig out the good excerpts from the arguments now, given that it's 1 a.m. Consider this a placeholder for the rest of the article.

I will, however, quote from an editorial "Thanksgiving 2000".

"This is going to be a Thanksgiving to remember. Never had Americans had more to be grateful for. No matter what other burdens afflict us, at least we are not counting votes in Broward County.
...
Those of us who live in New York are planning to give thanks that we reside in a chad-free zone. After decades of complaining about the ancient voting machines, we suddenly appreciate our good fortune. Sure, they break down a lot, but they're really excellent when it comes to limiting the voters to one candidate per race. Legend has it that New York produces more election law litigation every year than the rest of the nation combined, but this month somebody else has finally taken away the title. Just the other day Broadway Democrats, a political club in Manhattan, was forced to send out fliers for its post-election symposium with the name of the speaker left blank. 'We couldn't find an election lawyer -- they're all in Florida,' explained one of the organizers."


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Short on sleep already
Wednesday, October 27, 2004, 12:34 AM
And there's still 6 days to go.

Tomorrow I *should* get up and be on a conference call at 8 am for the EIRS stuff. But I probably will sleep in and do the 6 pm call instead. I'm not even sure if that's my training session or not; it's hard to tell from the email I got.

But I did get a pointer to another spiffy training guide on the Verified Voting site. (Go to their site map and look under resources.) Forty-eight pages chock full of useful information for poll monitoring. I haven't read any of them yet because I was embroiled in legal news from another part of my life.

Today, the Iowa suit finally arrived; the Sixth Circuit overturned the lower court decision in Michigan so that voters there don't get their provisional ballots counted unless they are magically at the right precinct, a New Jersey judge refused to bar the use of electronic voting machines at this late date, a federal judge in FLorida ruled that people who failed to check the citizenship box on their voter registration forms even though they signed an affirmation of it elsewhere on the form are s.o.l.; and the Ohio Republican Party gets ready to sue county elections boards that reject GOP voter challenges because they were not properly filed.

I'm sure I left out some lawsuits. They'll keep til tomorrow.

Side note: if you run into some sites that require registration, do what I did: 1) download and install Firefox. See ww.mozilla.org. 2) Download and install the Bugmenot extension. See www.bugmenot.com for this. Restart your browser. Then, when you see the registration page, right click in the username field, and select "Bugmenot" from the menu. Once you see the fields magically filled in, click submit, if the page doesn't submit automatically. Now you're done!


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November 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.



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Holy Shit!
Monday, October 25, 2004, 10:01 PM
Excuse me. But that's what I said when I heard the news this morning that Chief Justice Rehnquist was in the hospital with a tracheotomy for thyroid cancer. After all, I am one of those who think that this election will be decided by nother 5 to 4 vote. Or will that be a 4 to 4 vote? Suddenly things have gotten even *more* interesting.

In the meantime, the next lawsuit is almost here, as predicted, and I got a packet from Verified Voting in the mail with glossy handouts describing all of the electroniv voting machiens in use in California.

I tried to track down the details on the counting of paper ballots in California and got partway there after three phone calls (don't call the 1-888 number; you just get a voicemail system which in the end prompts you to leave your snail mail address). I'm still trying to get the rest of the details; more tomorrow if I get them.


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