Reefer Madness?

[M Holmes]

Arjan Hulsebos writes:

> On Tue, 31 Jul 2007 11:37:57 +0100, M Holmes wrote
> > The US put two armies of lawyers into three separate courts to sort 
> > it out and pretty much everyone else switched back to CSI or NASCAR until
> > they got back with the result.

> When there are court battles over the result of the elections, *something*
> *somewhere* is pretty fubarred. 

I totally disagree. The election was extremely close. At one point if Al
Gore had made another 600 votes he'd have shut down the counting and
called off his appeal and it would have been over (the Bush team let
their right of appeal run out on the clock as part of their tactics).

The three levels of Court (state, federal, supreme) had serious issues
of great substance to settle. At the most trivial were the rules of what
constituted a legitimate vote. The Florida rules applied there, but were
in some senses ambiguous, thus the hanging and pregnant chads debate.

Then there were arguments about timing for the sundry appeals, verification,
signing off the results etc. Essentially there were so many votes to
count by hand that there was no way to get the hob done before the votes
were legally due to be certified. That meant sampling and both camps had
an interest in doing the sampling such that it would uphold their
vote/skew things their way (choose one).

Then the Florida state courts put Katharine Harris (sp?) in a bind. She
had to legally certify the vote by a specific date or she would be
breaking the law. The Gore tem couldn't let her do that because they
were still behind in the vote. They got the State Court to back them and
so Katharine Harris was ordered by a State court to break Federal Law.
That had to go to the Federal courts. Something the Bush team wanted
strategically anyway because they knew that the State courts were
Democrat appointments and were famous for leftist activism.

Added to that was a side argument about military votes whch had been
excluded due to a fault in the military postmarking scheme.  The Bush
team tactically wanted them in "How can we exclude legal votes by
soldiers serving abroad?" because they were more likely Republican votes
and the Gore team wanted them out for the same reason. This did harm
Gore public relations of course, and in fact the 600 or so votes thus
acccepted did keep Bush in the lead at a point where Gore was within a
couple of dozen votes of getting a lead and closing dowwn the process.

Both the state and federal courts got their say-so on those.

The federal court fights reslulted in decisions going both ways, though
with a decisive edge to the bush team.  Eventually it went to the
Supreme court as a result of the timetable argument.  Florida was
getting close to being unable to fulfill its constitutional requirement
to send electors to the Electoral College.  That would have created a
whole other mess. 

In the end though, the election was settled according to the rules laid
down by law, with a bit of legal argument about what those laws actually
meant. This is precisely how a constitutional republic is supposed to work.

> No, not at all. No court should determine the outcome of an election

No court did. The courts ruled on what were legally valid votes, which
votes could be legally appeald and recounted and what the timings
available for such action were. They ruled on those based on laws which
were already on the books. Those rules, once interpreted by the courts,
were applied to the votes and a valid recount taken.

> that's
> the prerogative of the voters. There should be protocols on who is allowed to
> vote, who is allowed to be voted, how a voter should vote, and how to count
> the votes. You may have court battles over that _before_ the elections. Once
> that has been sorted out, you only have to follow the protocols.

In a perfect world yes. In our imperfect one, there was some ambiguity
in some of the rules, and some of the state rules turned out to
contradict federal ones in minor, but in this elction, crucial ways.
That mean court rulings were needed.

FoFP