Let every vote be counted. Unless it gores my ox.

Posted by: jones at June 24, 2004 06:22 PM

Democrats only believe in Democracy for the Democrats.

They try to steal the 2000 election, and when they failed, they blamed the Republicans for doing the very thing they had just tried.

So, it’s no surprise that they want to prevent Nader and his supporters from exercising their constitutional rights.

Does anyone think they would be doing this if Nader might be a threat to the Republicans?

Of course not.

In fact, they would immediately claim that they were going to stop the Republicans from doing it, which would come as a huge surprise to the Republicans, because they would do no such thing.

Not that it would stop the Democrats from CLAIMING he would.

They are simply incapbable of understanding that when you try to be everything to everybody, you eventually lose the race.

The Democratic party is in it’s death throes, and although it will continue to splinter for many years before becoming as irrellevant as the Tories, Whigs or Federalists.

The only real question is, which fragment of the shattered Democratic party will ascend to take it’s place opposite the republicans?

Posted by: eric at June 24, 2004 09:13 PM

I hasten to add that I don’t believe for a second that they took this action on their own.

God forbid that liberals ought to have a real choice between an anti-war candidate and a pro-at least for today-war candidate. I thought that the Dems were the party of choice?

Posted by: TL at June 24, 2004 09:14 PM

Dont worry, Judges never make a unfair decision that helps their own parties agenda.

do they?

Posted by: Redneck Texan at June 24, 2004 09:49 PM

Cheney tells U.S. Senator to ‘Go Fuck Himself’ on Senate floor.

Come on, Command Post. Cover it. Cover it just like you ripped and ripped and ripped on the “Kerry middle finger” hearsay from Ted Sampley.

Just posting the comment in case you miss its coverage in the (multiple, real) media outlets.

Posted by: Shem at June 24, 2004 10:53 PM

Cheney was just trying to help Leahy to decide where he stood on the gay marriage issue. Since he was waffling, a good ‘fuck yourself’ could stir the Senator to continue his support for the nasty deed. Or, it is possible Cheney got a look at Leahy’s big Vermonter in the bathroom, and was just comparing it to his big Haliburton!

Posted by: dickD at June 25, 2004 02:07 AM

Shem, it’s covered. Now tell us why democrats cant handle opposing opinions and have to resort to activist judges to take away voters choices.

Posted by: Brian at June 25, 2004 07:58 AM

Shem, your lack of gratitude is amazing. This is a private place and if you don’t like the editorial policies, take yourself elsewhere. My goodness what unmitigated gall.

As for what Cheney said: good on him!! Leahy is a pompous blowhard and his demeanor is so insulting that one could almost wish for a return to the code duello just so there would be at some hope of restraint.

The man has damaged reputations, engaged in the worst kind of demagogery and generally been less than what one should expect from an American Senator.

At any other work place Leahy would hear these words and more on a daily basis.

Bravo Cheney.

Now watch the press pounce on this.

cheney’s been quite critical of the press, and rightfully so, over the past few weeks. Our dear professional running dog socialist reporters won’t let this pass, no sir.

Posted by: skip at June 25, 2004 10:44 AM

Why shouldn’t D’s be fromaged about what Nader is doing? The R’s are, as they did last time, supporting Nader’s bid.

Read this:

http://oregonlive.com/news/oregonian/index.ssf?/base/front_page/108816503613780.xml

Posted by: Don at June 25, 2004 11:43 AM

Well, Don, it’s not the Republicans that brought the country to a halt in 2000 by suing over the election on the notion that every vote must count and democracy means being able to choose whomever you wish. That was the Dems. They’re all for Democracy and choice, after all they thought it just dandy when Buchanan and Perot sank Bush I and Dole, but only when it helps them. Suing to keep somebody off the ballot is cynical intimidating b.s. The way you deal with Nader is by campaigning better than he does, which ought not be that hard, or wouldn’t be if the Dems had a candidate worth his weight in Ostrich droppings.

Posted by: TL at June 25, 2004 12:28 PM

Like I said Don…

The Dems only believe in Democracy when it’s for THEM.

Don’t even TRY to justify their UN-Democratic actions on this issue.

Posted by: eric at June 25, 2004 12:31 PM

Eric: If the Ds erected a stalking horse candidate to run against the Rs, the R’s would be Howling To The Very Heavens about it.

And you’d be whining and sniveling that the Ds weren’t playing fa-a-ai-ir.

Clearly the Rs are trying to do precisely that. It’s not as though there’s some question.

TL: It may come as a shock to you, but doncha think that in an election, the Proper way to resolve it is to count All the votes, and ensure that every vote cast counts?

If we don’t do that, then what’s the point of an election at all?

Or do you merely wish to count the votes that can be counted within a preset time, then ignore the rest?

Posted by: Don at June 25, 2004 12:36 PM

Change the law if you don’t like it, Don. But not after the fact.

Plus, all the damn votes were counted and counted. Except from soldiers.

Posted by: jones at June 25, 2004 01:03 PM

“If the Ds erected a stalking horse candidate to run against the Rs, the R’s would be Howling To The Very Heavens about it.”

Except that Nader chose to run, and under the rules, republicans can vote for him as well as dems. Switching party affiliation for a primary or to get candidates on a ballot is not a new tactic, and is legal in every respect.

Your right that it is the votes that count, you just show the hipocracy of the dems by claiming they want all votes to count. It is clear in Florida that they only wanted democratic votes to count. That is why the dems held open the pols in only heavily democratic counties, and why they tried to dismiss presumably republican military votes.

Obviously the answer to your question “It may come as a shock to you, but doncha think that in an election, the Proper way to resolve it is to count All the votes, and ensure that every vote cast counts?” is NO when the dems stand a chance of losing. Doesn’t that disturb you?

Posted by: Brian at June 25, 2004 01:09 PM

Jones:

• There’s nothing about switching parties going on here. Nor is there any allegation of Illegal actions either. What is happening is the Rs supporting a stalking horse candidate in the hope of lessening a potential D margin. If the tables were turned, the Rs would be whining about it.

• If you actually Knew how recounts worked, it would be clear that the FL recounts were not aimed at counting Only D votes. It could not have happened that way, and it did not. But since you clearly don’t know how manual recounts are done, the explanation won’t matter to you. It’s been done previously.

• In any county where there was a line of folks already at the polls, those who were in line at the time the polls were due to close were allowed to vote. If they were not in line, they were not allowed to vote. That happens everywhere, in every state, where that situation came up. It always works that way.

• There was no attempt to “dismiss” military votes. FL state law required Any absentee ballot to have some form of indication on it that had it mailed prior to the cutoff on election day. Any ballot without such an indication would have to remain uncounted, under FL state law. Military or Civilian didn’t matter. And that’s the way it’s handled in every state as well. FL was and is not now any different.

But I find it fascinating that you prefer that votes Not be counted in an election. It falls under the more general rubric “Quit while you’re ahead” I suspect.

Which is what happened. No worries — I’m long since Over It, as the Wingnut contingent liked to whine at the time.

Posted by: Don at June 25, 2004 01:22 PM

How did we get from Nader in AZ to FL yet again?

the Democrats are using the deeply entrenched two party system to thier benefit. That’s in part what it’s there for. And yes I’m sure the republicans would use the legal system to benefit themselves.

Bottom line: the system’s wrong. If the laws are designed to restrain voter choice, then there are problems with it. if Nader wants to be on the ballot print his name on it!!

This reminds me of that Monty Python skit with the slightly silly candidates. Who’s gonna vote for him?

If the Democratic party has a problem with Nader’s candidacy it would be best if that were worked out via the campaign, not the court room. I would say the same were the Republicans suing to keep a viable conservative candidate off the ballot.

As for Republicans supporting Nader: Right ON!!!

Posted by: skip at June 25, 2004 01:59 PM

Silly question: What if the Dems are right, and Nader doesn’t have the required amount of valid signatures on his ballot? If that truly is the case, shouldn’t he be removed from the ballots?

Kevin

Posted by: Kevin at June 25, 2004 04:45 PM

Legally, perhaps he should be removed. Morally he should not. Morally the Democrats should not be filing this suit since it amounts to political intimidation. Put it another way, if Iraq were to hold elections where the courts were used to harass all islamic parties but one, guaranteeing a united theocratic vote, while nonreligous parties were permitted to proliferate, dividing the nonreligios vote, would you be worried about the health of their democracy? (if they had a WTA electoral system like we do, that is)

Posted by: CCR at June 25, 2004 05:58 PM

Thanks for the reply. I lean more towards any candidate who doesn’t meet the standards of appearing on the ballot shouldn’t be on the ballot. Nothing prevents people from including Nader, or anyone else as a write-in. Also, while I agree that it’s fishy in the way it’s handled, who else would you expect to bring suit? The Republicans, who likely aren’t going to lose votes to Nader?

Mind you, I don’t think Nader’s going to get 2% of the vote this time, as the people who voted for him last time saw a) how little support he had and b) who it got in the White House. I’m not sure how many people are willing to risk that again. Of course, I’m assuming that anyone who’s Pro-Nader would not have voted for Bush, so if I’m wrong on that, it kind of blows my theory. :)

Posted by: Kevin at June 25, 2004 06:30 PM

I think the people for whom Nader has the most appeal are people who generally don’t vote.

Posted by: marymcl at June 26, 2004 03:04 AM

Don,

The media conducted a recount at their own pace using every method requested or ordered during the whole court battle and Bush won EVERY SINGLE ONE. There were multiple allegations of voting irregularities, all of which were discredited.

And that wasn’t what Gore was suing over anyway — they wanted to count as votes things that were not votes under the law by moving to a subjective standard where a vote is in the eye of the beholder. The whole thing was a cynical attempt at a power grab, just like this b.s.

Posted by: TL at June 26, 2004 11:46 AM

Don,

The media conducted a recount at their own pace using every method requested or ordered during the whole court battle and Bush won EVERY SINGLE ONE. There were multiple allegations of voting irregularities, all of which were discredited.

And that wasn’t what Gore was suing over anyway — they wanted to count as votes things that were not votes under the law by moving to a subjective standard where a vote is in the eye of the beholder. The whole thing was a cynical attempt at a power grab, just like this b.s.

Posted by: TL at June 26, 2004 11:46 AM

TL:

• Media Recounts after the fact didn’t matter. They did not and Could not have changed a thing. The Supremes appointed Dubya, and that ended the discussion.

• It is, however, Not the case that Dubya won every single recount either.

• It is the case that there were between 5,000 and 10,000 actual votes that never were officially counted before the Supremes took their action.

• It was FL state law at the time that the Local Election Boards were the final judges of what was and was not a vote in a manual recount. No state standards for a manual recount existed at the time.

You just have your Facts wrong.

Both sides screwed up, but in different ways:

• The Ds should have requested a full, manual Statewide recount of all counties early on. They didn’t.

• The Rs objected to Any recount, anywhere. They were ahead at the time, and wanted all counting ended while they were still ahead.

That’s what really happened.

Posted by: Don at June 26, 2004 12:01 PM

Don, you tried to steal the election and you failed. Get over it.

Posted by: eric at June 26, 2004 12:36 PM

Don,

The WSJ published the story about the media recounts, and Bush did win every one, by varying margins. If you’ve got another source that proves otherwise, post it. And the media recounts do matter because they show that the Supremes’ putting an end to the circus did not affect the ultimate result. Also, while the Republican position was that no recount ought to be conducted beyond the statutory deadline, they did maintain that the only way to conduct a fair recount was to do it on a state-wide basis. Gore argued against a state-wide recall and only wanted a few majority-Democrat precincts recounted.

There is no credible evidence that 5k+ votes were supressed. That is a discredited rumor.

It would appear that the person with their facts wrong is you.

Posted by: TL at June 26, 2004 07:01 PM

You’re both right.

Under every scenario ordered by the Florida Supreme Court and demanded by the Gore campaign, Gore lost.

However, if OVER-VOTES were counted (ballots with more than one candidate for president indicated) then Gore would have won by some small margin depending on the methodology used to guess the vote.

For whatever reason, the Gore Campaign never requested that any over-vote ballots be divined, er, “counted,” only under-votes. Taking it’s cue from the Gore campaign, the FSC likewise only ordered recounts of under-votes. This failure to likewise account for over-votes was one of the reasons that all nine US Supreme Court justices noted “equal protection” problems with the FSC ruling.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at June 26, 2004 09:05 PM

I wasn’t aware of the over-vote issue, but I think there is a point where it is incumbent upon the voter to have some basic understanding of how to cast their vote and make sure they do it right.

Posted by: TL at June 26, 2004 09:56 PM

I agree TL, it’s like a friend of mine says: if you have guess at what the vote is, then it’s not a vote. Essentially that’s what Gore’s team did, intentionally or not, is attempt to obliterate the legal distinction between a ballot and a vote. And they came really close to being successful.

And unfortunately the Democrats DID manage to successfully use the courts in the 2002 Congressional races to throw out New Jersey election law by getting Frank Lautenberg on the ballot in spite of Article I Sec. 4 of the US Constitution when the US Supreme Court, still traumatized by 2000, refused to hear the case Republicans brought.

This of course means that we haven’t seen the last of candidates trying to use the courts to change the rules of the contest.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at June 26, 2004 10:37 PM

JZ: You continually miss the point. Probably deliberately.

In a manual recount, you don’t Guess — you Decide. And the decision is always unanimous, since the recount teams are made up of one R, one D and one representative of the elections administring office.

In FL, that responsibility was Solely that of the Local Election Board. Under FL State Law, the boards were authorized to set whatever standards they wished. There was no State Law to guide their actions — they were entirely on their own.

If an R representative disputed a D call on a ballot, it was not counted, but was challenged for the proper administrative body to render a decision on later.

Note that it was the Bush campaign that sued to stop all counting anywhere in Florida.

The US Constitution says that elections are a State matter, not a federal matter. The Supremes ruled in the NJ matter that it was for the State to decide, and was beyond federal jurisdiction.

Bush vs Gore, however, was not decided on that basis. The Supremes made a specific exception to the Constitutional rule on that matter. But it’s OK — they weren’t traumatized by their earlier ruling at all. In their written opinion, they made it quite clear that the ruling in Bush v Gore was applicable Only to that specific case, and was not to be relied on as precedent in any other.

Think of the NJ action as the Supremes returning to the Constitutional principles wrt elections being a State matter to administer.

It’ll ease your mind, some.

Posted by: Don at June 27, 2004 12:32 AM

Don,

You might want to learn about what you’re discussing and look up the rules on proper capitalization before adopting the tone of such a condescending a-hole. The reason the Supremes didn’t intervene in NJ is that there was no impairment of any constitutionnal right as there was in Florida. The court ruled 7-2 in the Florida case that the Florida statute, as interpreted by the Fl Supreme Court, violated the Equal Protection clause of the Constitution. As the NJ case involved only a violation of a state law relating to how parties choose a candidate and did not involve keeping a candidate that wanted to run off the ballot or impair how anybody’s vote was counted, there was no federal issue upon which the Court could rule.

Try reading the opinions, they might ease your mind some.

Posted by: TL at June 27, 2004 12:27 PM

Don said
“Eric: If the Ds erected a stalking horse candidate to run against the Rs, the R’s would be Howling To The Very Heavens about it.”

Don, theres not much need in the GOP constituency for a reform candidate. Its your silly party that needs serious culling and reforming and scares off even the zaniest of tinhatians…

Posted by: hound at June 27, 2004 12:40 PM

Note that it was the Bush campaign that sued to stop all counting anywhere in Florida.

Yes… AFTER the legal deadline for submitting results was past. Every vote in FL had been counted TWO OR THREE TIMES by then. Gore LOST.

It’s you that doesn’t seem to understand that elections are contests with rules. For any contest to have a decisive outcome, e.g., to be effective as an instrument for selecting political leaders, they have to actually END at some point. In Florida, as in many other states, the legislature achieved this result by the use of a DEADLINE rule. It was Gore who sued to force the FL Secretary of State to VIOLATE this deadline and keep counting “votes,” or whatever else the Gore people could pull out of the dumpster, until he “won.”

ALL of the FL lower courts that heard this case, ALL presided over by Democratic judges, threw Gore’s bullshit OUT. Then the FLSC got the case, and the Justices, again ALL Democrats, threw out the law and created new law out of whole cloth in blatant violation of both the US Constitution AND Federal election law.

The US Constitution says that elections are a State matter, not a federal matter.

WRONG. The US Constitution specifically says that the “time, manner and place” of elections are set by state LEGISLATURES, not “the states” or “state governments” and certainly not “state courts.” Furthermore, Congress is specifically given the power “at any time by Law” to make or alter state regulations, which it has done with many laws, including one that prohibits state election laws being altered fewer than twelve days PRIOR to an election.

You will find it consistent throughout the US Constitution that all matters pertaining to rules governing democratic processes are specifically put under the purview of the US House of Representatives or the state legislatures. It was the Founders intent to make sure that the rules governing American democracy were under the complete control of the institutions produced by that democracy and thus accountable to the People, and not controlled by a handful of unaccountable, unelected political appointees of a court.

Yet the FLSC ignored all of this and 200 years of pertinent case law and simply fashioned an outcome that benefited the candidate from their party the most—-TWICE. By the second time around, the court’s majority decision was so obviously and embarassingly whacked that the Democratic Chief Justice of the FLSC himself denounced the decision and publicly washed his hands of it as in his dissenting opinion.

When the second case finally got to the Supreme Court, all nine justices noted 14th Amendment problems with the ruling in their separate opinions, but Stevens and Ginsburg inexplicably voted to uphold an unwritten judicial custom of non-interference over the 14th Amendment. The other SEVEN justices voted to overturn the FLSC ruling, and five of them telegraphed in their opinions that if FL submitted returns after the “safe harbor” deadline prescribed by Federal law, they would rule to uphold the Federal law Souter and Breyer holding out, imagining that the FLSC could plausibly come up with some remedy scheme (although neither had any suggestions) in the hours left before the December 12th deadline prescribed by Federal law.

Think of the NJ action as the Supremes returning to the Constitutional principles wrt elections being a State matter to administer.

It’ll ease your mind, some.

That would be great, but doing so would require me to pretend that Article 1 Sec. 4 of the US Constitution doesn’t exist. I know Leftists are completely at ease with ignoring parts of the Constitution that stand between them and their preferred outcomes, but I have a problem with that.

History will view the 2000 election as an attempted coup by the FLSC and Al Gore as he attempted to dumpster-dive his way into the Presidency. And thanks to the innattention of SCOTUS in the NJ case, it’s guaranteed that BOTH major parties will attempt to use the courts to over-ride elections in the future. Maybe our democracy will survive, and maybe it won’t. Democracy only works if all sides agree to lose when they lose elections. If one side decides that they just aren’t going to lose, then it’s all over.

:jackson

Posted by: jackson zed at June 27, 2004 01:05 PM