- Elections are
supposed to be decided by voters on Election
Day, not by judges later
on. But once state and local courts inject themselves
into
post-election controversies, without any legal justification, the
only
institution that can get rid of their interference is the Supreme
Court
of the United States. Yet the U.S. Supreme Court is now being attacked
for taking this election out of the hands of judges.
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- The very same liberals who were
telling us just days
ago how terrible it is to criticize courts,
despite the grotesque double
standards being used in the Florida
recount, are now leading the charge
against the U.S. Supreme Court for
putting a stop to it.
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- Although the official vote was 5 to 4, the vote was 7
to 2 that what was done in Florida was a violation of the Constitution
of the United States, because it did not provide "equal protection
of the laws" as required by the 14th Amendment. Two justices
apparently
thought that this could be corrected, even at the 11th hour,
and let the
recount resume, but five other justices thought it was too
late for that.
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- Underlying the post-election chaos in Florida is the
notion
that Al Gore "really" won the popular vote in Florida
but
that all the votes for him just were not counted. No doubt this claim
will be repeated in the months and years ahead by demagogues and by those
gullible enough to believe them. But Gore himself obviously didn't believe
it. When the Florida Supreme Court asked Gore's lawyers if they wanted
a statewide recount, they declined.
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- What they wanted was a recount
confined to heavily Democrat
counties, under looser rules than in the
Republican counties or in the
rest of the state. This was such a gross
violation of any sense of fairness
that you don't need to be a
constitutional lawyer to know that this was
not "equal protection
of the laws."
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- They say you cannot step into the same river twice, because
the
water is moving all the time. Similarly, you cannot accurately recount
the same machine ballots twice because each counting causes chads to be
dislodged or other damage to the ballots, even when it is done with the
strictest honesty and impartiality. In short, they are not the same
ballots
any more, and perfection in reading them is out of the
question, whether
votes are counted by machine or by hand, and whether
they are counted once
or again and again.
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- Yet shrill voices were raised
early on, demanding that
more recounts be done to eliminate any
possible questions about accuracy.
The fact that something is desirable
seems to carry more weight with liberals
than the fact that it is
impossible.
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- Other shrill voices, led by Jesse Jackson, have been
raised,
claiming that blacks were "disenfranchised." Yet, in
all
these weeks, nobody took that claim to the courts, where they belonged,
since racial disenfranchisement would be a violation of the Voting Rights
Act and the Constitution of the United States. Instead, these inflammatory
charges were taken to the media, and Jackson is now threatening to take
them to the streets.
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- Another reckless claim is that Florida Republicans were
allowed to "tamper" with ballots or with ballot applications.
Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party handled absentee ballot
applications for some of their respective members. The only difference
was that the Republican Party did not include identification numbers on
these applications before submitting them to local election authorities.
Realizing their omission, they then went down to the election offices and
added these numbers.
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- This simple fact has been inflated into hysterical
charges
that election officials gave the Republicans a privilege denied
to Democrats.
But Democrats had no need to add numbers, since their
numbers were already
on the applications when they were
submitted.
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- Moreover, it is not "tampering" with an application
to put something there that is supposed to be there. And this was just
an application, not the ballot itself, which went out to the individual
voters. Yet this trivial act was the basis of legal efforts by Gore allies
to throw out the votes of 25,000 people, despite the Gore mantra that
"every
vote should be counted."
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- Former New York Gov. Mario
Cuomo has even countenanced
the idea that members of the Electoral
College who were elected to vote
for Bush should betray the voters and
vote for Gore. The only consistency
in all this is that the Gore camp
has been out to win at all costs, despite
losing recount after recount,
and without regard to the harm done to the
integrity of the process or
the reputation of individuals or institutions.
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