On Mar 31, 1:45 pm, (Doug Miller) wrote:
In article . com, wrote:

The FLSC was trying to rewrite Florida law to conform
to the 14th amendment. The USSC concurred 7 - 2
that the Florida election as it then stood did not meet
the equal protection requirements of the Constitution.

That's absolute nonsense; in fact, it's the exact *opposite* of what happened.

Nonsense.


The FLSC was trying to rewrite Florida election law to conform to its own
preconceived ideas of how the election "should" turn out, including (among
other things) the assertion that when the Florida legislature enacted a law
mandating certification of election results in seven days, it really "meant"
sevenTEEN.

Here you are confusing two different USSC decisions. Florida
law allowed for both a protest and a contest. I don't remember
which of these was first, but the first one was limited to 7 days.
Bush sued repeatedly to stop the counting so that it could
not be completed in the requisite 7 days.

The USSC upheld the decision to end the protest (or contest,
whichever was first) after 7 days, even though the counting
had been stopped several times during that period. The
argument for extending the deadline was based in part on the
several injunctions that had stopped the counting during the
seven day period. An analogy would be that a defendant doesn't
get to argue that he didn't receive a speedy trial if HE requested
a continuance. The argument for not extending the deadline
was that another remedy existed in Florida law--the contest.

That was the first Florida election case to reach the
USSC in 2000.

The 5-4 decision that ultimately decided the election in favor
of Bush relied (for the first time ever) on the Constitutionally
mandated voting date (so called 'safe harbor' date) of the
electoral college as its basis for enjoining further counting,
NOT any Florida law.

During both the protest and the contest the Bush team
employed the same tactic, repeatedly obtaining injunctions
to stop the counting until some deadline was reached.
'Counting' not 'recounting' because one county had a large
number of ballots that were not machine readable and were
never even examined until after the inauguration.

I say for the first time ever because the Consitution also
mandates that the newly elected Congress decides which
Electoral votes are 'regularly given'. The Congress has
twice, in 1877 and in 1961 accepted Electoral Votes
cast after the day on which the Electoral College was
supposed to meet and vote. Indeed, in 1877 the Congress
rejected votes cast ON that day.

Thus relying on the 'safe harbor' date was specious as
the Constitution allows the Congress to ignore it anyways.


The 7-2 vote by the USSC held that the recounts
as being conducted violated the law.

Yes.

In so doing they affirmed the FLSC decision
which also found that the recounts were being
conducted in violation of the law.

Specifically the equal protections clause of the
14th Amendment was being violated by only
recounting some votes in some counties
and by the use of different methods in
some counties, though some of the justices
may not have concurred on every point.




The difference wa that the USSC also issued an injunction
5 - 4, prohibiting remedy.

Wrong again. The 5-4 vote forced the recounts -- previously held illegal by a
7-2 vote -- to be stopped. Justices Souter and Breyer voted with the majority
that the recounts were being conducted in violation of the law; then, later
the same day, voted to allow them to continue anyway.

False.

Recounting votes per se did not violate the equal protection
clause. It was the manner in which the recounting (or for that
matter the first counting) was done that violated the equal
protection clause. For example, some counties used paper
ballots that were marked with a black marker and optically
scanned. Some of those 'prescanned' the ballots for the
voters to check for errors and offered the voter a second chance
if the ballot was unreadable or had other errors (e.g. over or
under votes) detected. Thus some voters had a better
chance of having their vote counted than others, violating
the equal protection clause.


You are aware, aren't you, that *every* recount taken post-election showed
Gore lost?

You are aware, aren't you, that the circumstances
met the requirements in Florida law that permitted
recounts under both the contest and the protest
yet Bush successfully sued to stop them so that
the only recounts that were completed were completed
after the inauguration?

The Supreme Court of the United States ruled that those
recounts were being conducted illegally.


Yes, for the reasons I stated.

The 5-4 ruling prohibited any attempt to count them
in accordance with the law, by stopping them from
being counted at all.

Aside from confabulating the two cases your attempt
to spin the decision into a declaration that it was
illegal to recount ballots in a disputed election
would be remarkable had I not already become a
ccustomed to such nonsense from you.



And you are correct, those showed that Gore lost
the popular vote in Florida.

Yep.


I also have little doubt that had the situation been reversed
we would have seen essentially the same cases with
the same arguments but with Gore as plaintiff and Bush
as defendant. I am less confident, however, that the decisions
would have been the same in any of the courts.

It would have been tragic if the votes had been miscounted
so as to change the result in favor of Gore, just as it would
be for any election to be miscounted producing an incorrect
result regardless of the comparative qualities of the candidates.

The tragedy we actually endured instead was a direct result
of the will of the electorate. Consider that as VP Gore chaired
a commission on airline security that, among other things,
recommended that airliner cockpit doors be closed and locked
at takeoff and remain that way during flight other than when
authorized persons were entering an leaving cockpit. How likely
do you suppose it would have been for Gore, as President, to
have tabled a rule he himself had recommended a year before?

How likely do you think it would have been for a Gore
administration to remove bin Laden's name from the State
Department's list of international terrorists or to abandon
the attempts to kill or capture him and disband the
program to track him. Some people, of course, will say
they are 100% confident he would have done those things
or worse. Such people are the real reason he was not
elected President.

--

FF