Dec 14, 2010

Report: Bush v. Gore 10 years later

Election night November 7, 2000 will be remembered by many as the night the ballot counting didn't end for several weeks with subsequent recounts of recounts in the state of Florida.

In an article at the link below George Will analyses the 2000 Presidential election in a report titled, Bush v. Gore, 10 years later.

The George Will report discusses the effort by election officials in heavily Democrat voting districts to guess voters' intentions when a chad was hanging or dimpled rather than punched all the way through.

Al Gore got certain Democratic-dominated canvassing boards to turn their recounts into unfettered speculations and hunches about the intentions of voters who submitted inscrutable ballots.

Before this, Palm Beach County had forbidden counting dimpled chads.

On Nov. 7, Gore finished second in Florida's Election Day vote count. A few days later, after the state's mandatory (in close elections) machine recount, he again finished second.

Florida law required counties to certify their results in seven days, by Nov. 14.

Three heavily Democrat counties were not finished trying to decipher voters' intentions.

So Gore's lawyers persuaded the easily persuadable state Supreme Court - with a majority of Democratic appointees - to rewrite the law. It turned the seven-day period into 19 days.

Democrats also tried to disallow a large number of votes from overseas military personnel that either arrived late or supposedly were not marked properly. Members of the armed services vote heavily Republican.

More at the link below including the Florida Supreme court's effort to revise state election law and how the U.S. Supreme Court was duty-bound not to defer to a state court that was patently misinterpreting - disregarding, actually - state law pertaining to a matter assigned by the U.S. Constitution to state legislatures.

Link