Reefer Madness?

[M Holmes]

Arjan Hulsebos writes:

> > Maybe I'm not up to beng unambiguous enough, but what I've been 
> > saying is that the courts decided which were legal votes and the 
> > legal votes decided the result.

> One of the rulings was that there were no more recounts.

That was because the time prescribed by law permitted for recounts ha
already run out.

> That's pretty much
> deciding the outcome of an election by a court rule in my book.

Nope, the countable legal votes decided the winner.  I don't have a dog
in this hunt.  I preferred Bush to Gore on the night but in pretty much
any way I can think of, the Bush administration has been a disaster for
the US (with the biggest disaster as yet merely a squall).  I'd almsot
rather Buchanan had been elected.  What is excellent news though was that
everyone concerned attempted to abide by the legal process to get the
issues settled.  Both sides had great honour in that regard. 

> > I don't disagree on the principle. I simply recognise the reality 
> > that English can be ambiguous. In pretty much every law of any 
> > account, there are gonna be ambiguities if someone in just the right 
> > odd set of circumstances tries to look fr them. In this case some 
> > guys wrote a law when folks only put X's on paper and didn't have 
> > the foresight to take into account machine votes with hanging chads 
> > and crumblies being kept alive so long into their dotage that they 
> > could vote for Pat Buchanan by mistake.

> So it should not be legal to vote with these machines if there's no
> provisioning in the law. How hard can it be?

Didn't some voters have to make 32 separate votes? If it were left to
hand counts, we'd probably still be waiting on the results.

Besides, it's a perfectly normal thing for the actual nuanced
interpretation of laws to be decided as necessary in a courtroom. The
legal system is far more set up for that than any ind of
once-and-for-all scheme.

> > Here's a prediction though: some of those hunnerd years old laws aren't
> > going to be up for email voting and digital signatures. Sooner or later
> > y'all will be shoulder-deep in lawyers again. That's just how life
> > works.

> No, you just amend the laws to include these things.

OK, tell me how we'll vote in 3000 years and we'll get the laws set now.
Will AI's be permitted to vote? How about smart chimps? How about
sim avatars of dead people? What? You don't know? Neither did those
guys. That's why the laws have to be interpreted for the new age of
voting machines.

> > Goven that the alternative is to be shoulder-deep in mud hiding from
> > bullets, it's not really such a bad thing.

> Gunlaws can fix that, you know (did I just type that?)

Thing is, they've hot Dick Cheney and he's shown he can shoot lawyers...

FoFP