No one has made any claim that Palm Beach County officials refused to give voters new ballots if they screwed up. Considering the political makeup of the county, the officials would probably have mostly been Democrat voters themselves. The real issue here is a simple one: I'm quite willing to accept for the sake of argument that Buchanan got a thousand or so votes that he shouldn't have from senile voters. But if everyone I know who claims that their relatives, friends etc. accidentally voted for Buchanan was claiming the truth, he would have had 60,000 votes....the law does not guarantee you a vote, it guarantees you the same opportunity to vote as everyone else has. For example, if you get in a car accident on the way to the polls and end up in the hospital, tough luck. Sorry. Look at it this way. Considering the snafus around the country (which the Republicans are perfectly capable of bringing up...and if we litigate all such claims we'll be here until past January 20th and then Dennis Hastert becomes President (literally)), I don't have the foggiest clue how many voters intended to vote for Bush on election day and how many intended to vote for Gore...but imagine this: 15,000 voters intend to vote for Candidate X, 14,950 intend to vote for Candidate Y, through bizarre coincidence, 75 Candidate X voters are hospitalized with E. Coli the morning of the election without voting while only 24 Candidate Y voters are hospitalized (because Jack in the Box is primarily frequented by Candidate X voters). Candidate Y wins with 14,926 votes while Candidate X has 14,925. The will of the people, no. A legal result, yes. These sorts of inequities happen all the time in the law because the alternative is worse. So they screwed things up in the northernmost banana republic; happens all the time here. But try telling the country that the presidency will be determined by a statistical analysis of how residents of the People's Republic of Palm Beach County would have voted if they could follow arrows. We can't afford months of litigation...screwy ballots should be fixed pre-election and I've got a feeling that ones for the next election will be closely scrutinized, which is a good thing. Nathan Freeburg
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.4.0: Sat 12 Feb 2022 12:30:43 AM EST EST