Reefer Madness?

[mike coleman]

*goooood gawd ARJAN,,,,,,,how did you get so many words out of him*
*while my ADD prevents me from understanding even the remotest bit about
politics, the maker lets me see other things......like.......the dewds
typos....Michael you've got a flask don't you???*


On 7/31/07, M Holmes <fofp at holyrood.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> 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
>