Gore to contest attack county's recount
By Joel Engelhardt, Palm Beach Post Staff Writer
Saturday, November 25, 2000
In a strong indication that the Democratic campaign's desperation level is rising, lawyers for Al Gore spoke openly Friday of contesting the recount results in Palm Beach County -- the Democratic bastion they once thought would allow them to carry Florida.
While that puts the Gore campaign in the awkward position of challenging the very recount it demanded, Democratic lawyers are aggressively pursuing it because the manual recounts in South Florida aren't likely to give the vice president enough votes to offset Texas Gov. George W. Bush's 930-vote Florida lead.
For the first time, Gore lawyers also plan to challenge Palm Beach County's controversial butterfly ballot, claiming it cost him thousands of votes here, Democratic lawyers said Friday. Squads of attorneys have collected 10,000 sworn affidavits signed by local residents, many of them from southern county precincts, who said they were confused by the ballot or were refused help or given wrong information by poll workers.
Gore also plans to contest the Miami-Dade canvassing board's decision to abandon its manual recount.
As the tortured hand count limped forward Friday, it became increasingly clear that if the Palm Beach canvassing board hews to its present counting standards, Gore will not get the votes he needs to catch Bush, at least not in Palm Beach County. With 244 of the county's 637 precincts reporting, Bush showed a net gain of 10 votes over Gore. Approximately 50 precincts in south county, where Gore's support was strongest, have been reported. They have helped his cause very little.
Meanwhile, in Broward County, the canvassing board got through 1,206 of its nearly 2,000 disputed ballots. So far, the manual count in Broward has produced a net gain of 369 votes for Gore against Bush's 930-vote Florida lead.
Again, the news was not so good for Gore. The Democrats had hoped to grab easily more than 1,000 votes in a South Florida recount, figuring that the thousands of dimpled ballots -- those indented, but not fully punched out -- would eventually be counted as votes for the vice president.
In Palm Beach County, bleary-eyed canvassing board members toiled late into the night. It quickly became evident that the board, which took Thanksgiving Day off, would have to commit more time, possibly meeting through Saturday night, to finish by a court-ordered 5 p.m. Sunday deadline.
The board, dealing just with ballots questioned by party observers during a six-day manual count, counted 1,500 ballots in about 12 hours Friday.
But that pace is not fast enough to complete the remaining 4,000 to 6,000 ballots unless they work longer hours. Scrambling to pick up the pace, they moved up today's starting time to 8 a.m.
"We will go through all of them, even if we have to stay here overnight," canvassing board member Carol Roberts said.
Democrats upset that the board still did not count every ballot with any mark -- no matter how tiny -- near a candidate's name said they would not limit their election challenge to dimples.
"I want to assure the American public that if the vote is certified and all the votes of the people are not counted we would move into court to contest this election," Democratic attorney Ben Kuehne said.
Such a challenge wouldn't get started until Monday, assuming the canvassing board finishes Sunday afternoon.
The Democrats have gone to court twice for clarity on dimples. But on Friday, they left the legal details behind to argue before the canvassing board that many county voting machines are faulty, forcing voters to leave incomplete marks on their ballot -- particularly in the first column of the ballot, the very one that listed candidates for president.
Republicans countered with a fresh attack on the Florida Supreme Court opinion that cited an Illinois case that Democrats said showed that dimples should be counted. But GOP lawyers said the Illinois Supreme Court ruling doesn't make the Democrats' case for counting dimples. In that case, they pointed out, only eight of 27 dimpled ballots were accepted by a circuit court judge.
While Democrats urged the board to adopt Broward County's more liberal standard for accepting dimples, Republicans urged them to stay their course rather than comply with their neighboring county's "zigging and zagging" rules.
Democrats saw that argument as disingenuous since Republicans have been calling for uniform standards among the counties conducting hand counts.
After listening to the arguments for an hour, the canvassing board did not vote to alter its previous standard, which counted dimples only if the voter cast dimpled votes in other races.
However, board Chairman Charles Burton, a county court judge, indicated some additional dimples would count.
"It seems to me the clear intent of the case law is votes should be included," he said.
"I feel that this board has been acting in a manner that has been consistent with trying to determine the intent of the voter. Clear and convincing, I think, is too high a standard. But if we can barely obtain (the voter's) motives, I think we should do that," he said.
The board's first scrutiny of a dimpled ballot yielded an unlikely result: Republicans objected to a vote counted for Bush.
But those conflicts were few and far between in a day devoted to the deadly dull mantra of Burton calling "3" for Bush, "5" for Gore or "under-vote" when no choice could be determined. Friday's give-and-take among board members and party observers was easily audible to reporters, unlike much of the discussion in the past week.
Democrats said the board's standard shifted as the day wore on. Ultimately, the board counted only the biggest, clearest dimple marks as votes and refused to count the rest.
"They're still not doing it right. But they're doing it better," Kuehne said.
By the Democrats' count, 1,180 uncounted ballots should have gone to Gore and 785 should have gone to Bush. They claim that after 306 precincts Gore has a net gain of 32, which could indicate that the vice president is starting to collect some dimple votes.
Republican observers appeared happy with the way the count proceeded and refused to answer reporters' questions.
However, U.S. Rep. Asa Hutchinson, R-Ark., and Griffin Bell, former attorney general under Jimmy Carter, stopped by to observe the count and meet with reporters.
"My problem is with the process," Hutchinson said. "A computer card is designed to be read by a machine and we have people trying to look at this computer card, trying to divine the intent of the voter. They are being assigned an impossible task."
In contesting the county results, Kuehne said the Democrats will claim as Gore votes most of the ballots cast for both Gore and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan. Those votes were caused by the confusion of the butterfly ballot, Kuehne said.
Staff writers George Bennett, Bill Douthat, Robert P. King, Jennifer Peltz, Scott McCabe and Michael Van Sickler contributed to this story.
joel_engelhardt@pbpost.com
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Walter Williams
Majority rule equals tyranny
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THE CONTROVERSY surrounding this year's presidential election has led to calls to abandon the Constitution's Article II provisions for the Electoral College to select presidents. Despite the fact the system has served us well for over 200 years, many Americans now call for its abandonment in favor of electing presidents by popular vote. Before we do this, let's consider the function it performs.
California, Ohio, Texas, New York, New Jersey, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Michigan can boast a combined population of 137 million. That's slightly more than half our 272 million national population. It's therefore conceivable that just nine states could determine the presidency in a popular vote. The Electoral College gives states with small populations a measure of protection against domination by states with large populations. That's because the nine high-population states have a total of 243 electoral college votes, but 270 are needed to win the presidency.
Compare Wyoming to California. California's population is over 33 million, while Wyoming's is 480,000. Thus, California has 69 times more people than Wyoming. California has 54 electoral college votes (since it has 52 congressmen and two senators), while Wyoming has three votes. In terms of the Electoral College, California has only 18 times as many votes as Wyoming. The Electoral College forces presidential candidates to appeal to voters in states with small populations.
The Constitution's Framers feared tyranny of the majority. That's why there's an Electoral College -- plus, even though California's population is 69 times that of Wyoming's, both states have two senators.
Despite public consensus, there's nothing inherently just or fair about majority rule. In fact, one of the primary dangers of majority rule is that it confers an aura of legitimacy and respectability on acts that would otherwise be deemed tyrannical. Ask yourself what day-to-day decisions would you like to be decided by majority rule? What about where you live, for whom you work, what kind of car you drive, what clothing you wear, what woman you marry?
You say: "Williams, those decisions are nobody else's business but mine. What's more, those are issues that don't belong in the political arena anyway!" You're right. Plus, we'd all agree that it would be nothing short of tyranny if where you could live and whom you could marry was decided by majority rule.
What if the decision whether to enslave a group of people were made through a popular vote instead of a dictatorship? Wouldn't you say that it was tyranny nonetheless? Instead of enslave, we could easily substitute the words rape, murder, rob and torture, and reach the same conclusion. Those examples are extreme and unlikely in the United States, but the principle is just as applicable on questions like: Should a popular vote decide how much of my weekly salary is set aside for retirement, or how much is set aside for housing, clothing, food and entertainment? If a popular vote decided these questions, there's still tyranny, but of a lesser degree.
Americans should read the wise words of James Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10. There's no clearer statement that the Framers fashioned a republic and not a pure democracy. Our Constitution set limits on not only the power of the three branches of the federal government, it also set limits on the arbitrary will of the people that might be expressed through a majority vote.
Madison said, "Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." And he's right.
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Jewish World Review Nov. 23, 2000 / 25 Mar-Cheshvan, 5761
Thomas Sowell
PLOYS R US
http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- THE FLORIDA SUPREME COURT has disgraced itself and undermined election laws, not just for this election in Florida but for future elections across the country. Any future losing candidate in a close election now knows that he need only create enough noise and confusion, and then shop around for sympathetic judges.
On the eve of this election, no one in his right mind would have thought that it would be decided by hand-counting ballots in three counties in Florida and machine-counting the other 64 counties. It is not just a question whether dents on a ballot should count as votes, but whether dents should count as votes in heavily Democratic counties, while only perforations count as votes in the rest of the state.
Amid all the pious talk about wanting every vote to count, the Florida Supreme Court has not lifted a finger to enable the military ballots from overseas to be counted. Nor does the pious statement by Florida's Democratic attorney general that he would like to see the military ballots counted have the slightest effect, because he has no authority in this matter, and local Democrats who are counting the votes are disregarding his words. The attorney general knew that his words would not change the vote-counting, but it was a clever political ploy to sound sympathetic to the people serving in the military overseas -- while continuing to disenfranchise them on a technicality.
This whole post-election free-for-all could be called "Ploys R Us." These ploys have even included trying to corrupt the electoral college itself by digging up dirt on Republican members of that college and then contacting them to try to "persuade" them to vote for Gore, even though they were elected to vote for Bush.
The legal issue before the Florida Supreme Court was not how ballots were counted. The legal issue was whether Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris abused her discretion by not extending the statutory deadline to allow time for hand counting. This was not Ms. Harris' deadline. It was the deadline established by law. Although she had the discretion to extend it -- as, for example, when there are hurricanes, floods or power outages -- discretion doesn't mean anything if anyone who asks for an extension has to get it.
Disasters beyond the control of local election officials are one thing. But, if large counties with hundreds of thousands of votes choose a method of counting them that they cannot or will not complete within the deadline, does that give them an automatic extension to take however long they want? Or however long judges want to give them? Why then does the law give discretion to the Secretary of State? The point here is not just that the judges made the wrong decision. It was not their decision to make.
The Constitution gives different powers to different branches of government for a reason. "Separation of powers" is not just some arcane phrase used by constitutional lawyers. It is what keeps us free. Power is too dangerous to all be in one set of hands, whether judicial, executive or legislative. But the Florida Supreme Court has a history of usurping powers belonging to other branches of government. Now they have given us a civics lesson in corruption -- how the use of arbitrary power from the judicial bench can even determine who becomes President of the United States. But we have gotten used to judicial despotism and some even confuse the fiats of judges with the rule of law -- which is the real danger for the future of this country.
The media have covered all this as a horse race between Bush and Gore, with very little attention being paid to what it means for the country and for the future. Some seem to think that it makes them "objective" if they condemn "both sides."
Just what is it that the Bush side has done? They played by the rules. When the Florida votes were counted in the way prescribed by Florida law, Bush won. When the votes were automatically recounted because of the narrow margin of victory, Bush won again. Only after Gore's operatives came up with another way to count votes -- or dents on ballots that could be called "votes" -- did Bush go into court. Meanwhile, the state governor recused himself from exercising his own right to vote on the decisions being made because his brother is a candidate.
If those who play by the rules are to be equally condemned with those who make up their own rules after losing, are we not in an Alice in Wonderland situation? Or is it just the land of "Ploys R Us"?
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Saturday November 25, 2000; 5:42 PM ET
Clinton Sabotaging Bush Transition
Though President Clinton has publicly acted above the fray over the disputed presidential election, privately he's doing whatever he can to make life more difficult for George W. Bush should the Texas Republican come out ahead in Florida.
"The General Service Administration (GSA) has been ordered not to hand over the keys to the presidential transition office in downtown Washington or to make available the $5.3 million earmarked by Congress to fund the initial stages of the changeover from one administration to the next," reports Insight Magazine.
Insight says a memo from Clinton chief of staff John Podesta warns all government agencies not to help either Bush or Gore until the Electoral College has voted on December 18.
Theoretically the narrow thirty-two day window the next president will then have to get organized before inauguration day hurts both sides equally.
But in reality, the hand-off from Clinton-Gore to Gore-Lieberman would require far less effort, since many of Clinton's Democratic appointees would already have a loyalty to Gore and could remain in place indefinitely.
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Saturday, November 25, 2000
Evidence of Massive Ballot Tampering in Palm Beach County
There is "explicit statistical evidence of massive ballot tampering in Palm Beach, Fla.," says expert statistician Robert Cook, who notes that ballot errors only occurred in presidential races.
And, he adds, the same kind of ballot tampering occurred in Palm Beach County in 1996.
In an analysis sent to Michael Reagan, Cook, a nuclear engineer with a track record for analyzing and correcting trends, errors and mistakes in heavy construction projects (ships, power plants, nuclear reactors, military and aerospace vehicles, etc.) for more than twenty years, put forth a compelling case that the 19,120 presidential race ballots at issue in Palm Beach County were "destroyed by deliberate double-punching ballots with a 'second punch' for Al Gore or Pat Buchanan."
Cook used what Reagan called "simplified but wide-ranging statistical comparisons to establish beyond doubt that Democratic operatives "stole," by double-punching ballots, "approximately 15,000 Bush votes in Palm Beach County and approximately 3,400 additional Buchanan votes." Cook charges that his statistical analysis shows:
· 19,120 presidential race ballots were destroyed by deliberate double-punching ballots with a "second punch" for Al Gore or Pat Buchanan. (In 1996, an additional 15,000 Dole and Perot ballots were destroyed by double-punching presidential ballots in Palm Beach County.)
· The national error rate of double-punching ballots is less than 1/2 of 1 percent, or at most, 1,800 ballots in all of Palm Beach County, with the errors between all races and all candidates.
· Palm Beach County has an error rate 10 TIMES larger than reported in ANY other county in the nation using paper punch ballots!
· ONLY in Palm Beach were 15,000 ballots "invalidated" (for double-punched ballots) in the 1996 presidential election.
· ONLY in Palm Beach did this "double punch" error happen ONLY in the Gore-Bush-Buchanan selections for president. (In a truly random "error," the mistakes happen in every race, at about the same rate. In Palm Beach, the massive errors (over 19,000) ONLY happened in the presidential race.)
· ONLY in Palm Beach did Gore GAIN 750 votes in a recount. In 50 out of 67 counties in Florida, the actual change in the recount was 5 to 7 votes, and in 63 out of 67 counties, the total change was fewer than 30 votes either way.
· Further, in 63 out of 67 counties the "changes" were somewhat evenly divided between ALL the candidates, in rough proportion to the original number of votes. This is the statistically expected result and represents a true and legal recount of the ballots without any change in the ballots themselves.
· There are about 15,000 "Bush + Gore" ballots that have mostly Republican choices below. THESE ARE FRAUDS. They represent Bush votes that were stolen.
· A "mistaken" "Gore + Buchanan" voter would ALMOST CERTAINLY have chosen the Democrats in the rest of the ballot ... or if, AS THEY CLAIM, those "Gore + Buchanan" voters who were "told to push the second hole" really meant "only followed directions," THEN the rest of the ballot would be solid Democrat, or blank.
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Saturday, Nov. 25, 2000 10:10 AM EST
Miami Resident Admits Ballot Punching Was Done
Earlier this week, Jack Thompson reported that a video shows members of the League of Women Voters punching ballots that supposedly had already been voted in a Miami election. Sound fishy?
Well, we note in today's Miami Herald, a member of the League of Women Voters writes that Miami-Dade had a unique way of handling questionable, indented ballots.
"Volunteers" would simply help determine who the voter intended to vote for and punch the ballot after the election.
Here is the letter to the editor from today's Herald:
As a volunteer and former board member of the League of Women Voters, I spent many an election eve assisting our Elections Department. If we were able to easily remove loose chads by hand, we were instructed to do so to prepare the ballot for counting by the machine; if chads were indented or if ballots were otherwise marked or irregular, we presented them to staff for further action. It was never my experience that our handling of the ballots resulted in the creation of new holes or unintended votes. The cardboard stock ballot is tough enough to sometimes resist even intentional poking by the voting pin. It isn't readily subject to partisan ``manipulation'' as has been suggested by those who would discredit a manual recount.
DANIELLA LEVINE
Miami
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Gore Won’t Get the Palm Beach Votes He Needs
Christopher Ruddy
Saturday, Nov. 25, 2000 4;15 PM EST
West Palm Beach—A source close to the canvassing board here say the hand count of approximately half of more than 8,000 questionable ballots won’t give Gore much of an advantage.
Gore’s team was counting on more than 400 votes from the last stage of the manual recount, but so far he may only gather a handful of votes and no where he need to get to win.
Vote totals now show a net gain of seven votes for Bush.
Palm Beach has used a slightly more restrictive standard that neighboring Broward County uses – and it refused to count a ballot with a "dimpled” chad for a presidential candidate unless the ballot shows multiple dimples for other vote selections.
The head of the Palm Beach county canvassing board, Judge Charles Burton, told NewsMax.com that the board has ignored many ballots that he described as "dinged” – ballots that had a slight pressure on them but were not pregnant or clearly indented.
Asked which candidate would gain the most if such ballots were counted, Burton said such dinged ballots seem to be going both for Gore and Bush.
"We just finished a precinct full of dinged ballots, and Bush would have cleaned up,” Burton said.
Burton said that ballots such as dinged ones, or ones that have been objected to by either side, have been placed in a separate stack.
He believes that if the results are contested by the Gore campaign a judge may review all the questionable ballots again.
Burton added, laughing, that when that happens, "I’ll be home laughing watching the judge look at those ballots.”
The judge believes Palm Beach will make the Sunday deadline and plans to work around the clock and through the night if necessary to make the deadline.
"I don’t think Katherine Harris is going to give us a continuance,” Burton said.
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Supreme Court Must Scare Gore
Jack Thompson
Saturday, Nov. 25, 2000
The U.S. Supreme Court's grant of a writ of certiorari to the campaign of Gov. George W. Bush, thereby agreeing to hear his appeal of the bizarre Florida Supreme Court ruling mandating the inclusion of the hand recounts in the vote totals, has confounded the Gore campaign and his team of lawyers.
What it ought to do is scare the hell out of them. Literally.
Gore's lead counsel, David Boies, confidently predicted, shortly after his win in the Florida Supreme Court Tuesday night, that there was no way the U.S. Supreme Court would review that win.
Friday afternoon, however, upon receiving word that the U.S. Supremes would hear the case, Boies flat-out lied on camera, in response to an interview on the run by Fox's Brett Baier. Boies told Baier he had never said that the USSC would not grant a hearing on Bush's appeal, but rather that he had only predicted Gore would win the appeal. Fox News had fun all afternoon playing Boies' first statement, which he then said, in his second statement, he didn't say.
It reminded this reporter of the time Howard Cosell on a Monday night football game exclaimed, "Look at that little monkey run!" Cosell denied he said it, despite the tapes of the broadcast proving otherwise.
The Boies spin reveals new panic in the Gore camp. For if this is purely a state issue, then why has the highest court in the land agreed to hear the case on federal constitutional grounds?
The Gore team has known all along about the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals case of Roe v. Alabama, which overturned an Alabama Supreme Court ruling that had changed the way votes were counted, after an election. Sound familiar? And that was in a state election, not a federal one. How much greater is the weight of the Bush argument for federal review of a federal election and for the only office in which the candidates are elected by the entire nation?
Gore is in deep trouble this moment. Whereas Florida's Supremes are an activist court for partisan reasons, at least the U.S. Supreme Court has been activist for the purpose, in their minds, of reining in states not compliant with the U.S. Constitution.
The Bush argument that will be heard is that the Florida Supremes violated equal protection, due process, and separation of powers provisions of the federal Constitution. Sounds right to me. And here's a bet that it will sound right to Rehnquist's robed brethren.
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Bush to declare himself the winner tonight
By David Wastell in Washington
GEORGE W BUSH is preparing to declare himself America's President-elect tonight when final results for the bitterly disputed state of Florida are announced after 19 days of delays and recounts.
Republic of chads: a canvassing board judge examines a ballot paper
Although hand recounts had whittled Mr Bush's lead in Florida down to 590 votes by early yesterday - from 930 last weekend - it looked unlikely that his Democratic rival, Vice-President Al Gore, would make up the gap before today's deadline. Katherine Harris, Florida's Secretary of State, will certify the official result at 11pm GMT tonight. Victory in the "Sunshine State" will give the successful candidate enough votes in the US electoral college to win the closest presidential race this century.
Mr Bush is planning to visit his Texas governor's mansion in Austin today to claim his expected victory, despite outstanding legal challenges and the surprise decision of the federal Supreme Court to step into the controversy over hand-counted votes in Florida. A frantic scramble to complete the recount of votes in two Democrat-leaning counties by tonight's deadline was under way this weekend. The Gore campaign is clinging to the hope that examination of 600 disputed ballots in Broward county and a further 6,000 in Palm Beach county - where 275,000 voting cards had still to be reviewed by yesterday morning - would squeeze out enough extra votes to win.
With the arithmetic still appearing to favour Mr Bush, the Gore campaign looked likely to challenge several county results in the Florida courts this week. Whatever happens tonight, the Vice-President is not expected to admit defeat. As a precaution against unexpected gains by Mr Gore, the Bush campaign has launched challenges of its own, arguing that overseas military votes which would favour the Texas governor have been wrongly excluded.
Mr Gore's campaign was still reeling last night from the US Supreme Court's decision to break with precedent and intervene in the election. Senior advisers said he would concede if it ruled against him on Friday. The court is to hear complaints on behalf of Mr Bush that the hand recounts ordered by Florida's state Supreme Court are unconstitutional. If it agrees, Mr Bush would be the victor, even if Mr Gore managed to claw back the lead in tonight's official tally.
Gore aides took some comfort from the fact that the federal Supreme Court's intervention would buy time for their county-by-county challenges this week, easing pressure from some senior Democrats to concede defeat if he is behind tonight. They also said that a court ruling would give legitimacy to the final outcome - whoever wins.
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