Posted on 10/13/2004 9:52:50 PM PDT by SmithL
MIAMI -- As President George W. Bush and Sen. John Kerry squared off in their last debate Wednesday night in Arizona, key Kerry operatives were working to make sure that Democrats don't end up again feeling that a potential victory at the polls is snatched from them.
The specter of the 2000 presidential election, plagued by partisan legal battles and decided unceremoniously by the Supreme Court, floats freely over Florida, where the Bush-Gore debacle could be repeated if the election turns out to be as close as polls predict.
Florida is one of several key states where lawyers, both Republican and Democrat, are girding for possible lawsuits hours after the polls close on November 2. And in states like Florida, the judicial process is already under way.
"What we've done in Florida is, of course, learned from the past," says Stephen Zack, a Miami attorney who tried Gore's case in Tallahassee in 2000 and is now serving as chief counsel for the Kerry-Edwards campaign in the state.
"People say, how come no one was prepared for the [2000] election? No one was prepared because nothing like this had ever happened. It was inconceivable that the presidency would be determined by the courts."
After the 2000 election anything is, of course, conceivable. The night of the last presidential election, Zack received a call from the Gore campaign asking him to argue in a Florida court in favor of a recount in Dade County.
"They said it would take 15 minutes. I never saw my office again for a month," Zack said during an interview at his Miami office on October 4, the deadline for registering in Florida.
"The worst-case scenario is a close election in Florida that's determinative of the [overall] election.
(Excerpt) Read more at jpost.com ...
democrats are fighting the last war again.
What a load of shit. The ONLY people who screwed voters in Florida were the Democrats.
Hastings...to the RESCUE?
That's exactly right and as a retired military man who has always had to rely on the absentee ballot being overseas, I find the efforts of Gore and his lawyers to stop the absentee ballot in Florida just unbelieveable.
As much as Democrats get in our face, we'll be right back in theirs. They will NOT steal this election like they tried to steal the last one. We will not let them do it.
Where's the lawyer for the Panhandle Repubs who in 2000 were told to go home an hour before the polls closed? I'm sorry, I didn't hear the Dems' reply...
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