Posted on 11/15/2002 4:46:40 PM PST by Mr. Mulliner
On Law: Gore's beef with the Supreme CourtBy Michael Kirkland
UPI Legal Affairs Correspondent
Published 11/15/2002 3:48 PM
WASHINGTON, Nov. 15 (UPI) -- Vice President Al Gore, in several interviews to be broadcast and published this weekend, will once again claim that the Supreme Court decision in Bush vs. Gore cost him the 2000 presidential election.
Though Gore may have every right to be aggrieved, the claim about the Supreme Court is simply untrue. In fact, it's been decisively disproved.
But like a particularly feisty vampire, it keeps rising from the grave.
There's no doubt that the decision handed down by the Supreme Court at 10 p.m., Dec. 12, 2000, was deeply flawed.
Remember? It seems as if it happened a long, long time ago, not two short years.
By a 5-4 vote, the justices ended the manual recount in 64 of Florida's 67 counties. That meant Texas Gov. George W. Bush won the popular vote in Florida by less than 600 votes, capturing that state's 25 electoral votes.
Bush was behind a half-million popular votes across the country, but the victory in Florida gave him exactly a one-vote majority in that lavender-dressed grandma of democracy, the Electoral College.
The Texas governor claimed the presidency. Gore took to the courts. The Supreme Court justices decided the election along strictly political lines.
Or did they?
A few months after the election, a media consortium led by the Miami Herald performed an audit of the 2000 Florida vote. The audit received little publicity. Most papers buried it in the back pages.
As expected, the audit showed thousands more people left the state polls at least thinking they had voted for Gore rather than for Bush.
That fact probably caused the television networks initially to predict Gore the winner in Florida, though they had to retract that prediction once it became apparent that the exit poll interviews on which the prediction was based weren't matching up with the official tallies.
What the networks didn't know then was that significant portion of the votes cast for Gore were not being counted.
So far so good for the Gore camp. But the audit also showed an anomaly.
If Gore had prevailed in the Supreme Court, Bush's lead would have increased, not evaporated.
The problem was that the case before the Supreme Court involved recounts ordered in only 64 counties.
The audit demonstrated that if Gore had won everything he wanted from the Supreme Court, including a liberal counting of hanging chads, Bush's statewide lead would have increased from less than 600 to around 1,600.
The votes that would have put Gore over the top weren't even at issue in Bush vs. Gore. Those votes were in the three counties where the manual recount had ostensibly been completed.
The audit said that poll workers in the three counties, all heavily Democratic and overseen by Democratic office holders, missed counting thousands of legitimate Gore votes that should have been tallied no matter what system was being used to keep score.
The thousands of Gore votes missed in those three counties would have been more than enough to wipe out Bush's tiny lead in the remaining 64 counties.
Gore didn't lose the presidency because of a political vote by the Supreme Court. He lost the White House because of the incompetence of a few Democratic controlled poll workers.
Ironic, isn't it?
So did Gore really win the 2000 presidential election? Your guess is as good as mine. Recent estimates say at least 6 million legitimate votes cast in November 2000 were not counted for one reason or another.
So who knows whether Gore or Bush would have won?
When the five conservatives members of the Supreme Court handed down their decision, they knew it was bad law. In fact, they tried to include language in it so that the 5-4 opinion would not become a precedent.
And I'm sure they at least thought they were deciding the election. The majority did make one confident prediction, however,
"After the current counting," the justices said in their opinion, "it is likely legislative bodies nationwide will examine ways to improve the mechanisms and machinery for voting."
That's happened in a few states. If it's happened in the rest of the country, it's not getting much press.
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
Forget what the law said in Florida, forget the legislating from the bench of the FSSC, forget that in the end, after all the counts and audits by independent companies
...... GORE STILL LOST.
The Heck with his "beef" with SCOTUS. How about MY BEEF WITH THE FLORIDA SUPREME COURT? Gore tried to cheat, steal, & lie his weaselness into the White House. Go away. You SMELL.
This writer campaigning for "GORE in '04" conveniently fails to mention the 7-2 decision that also would have stopped recounts all by itself. Was that the "equal treatment" decision? I no longer recall.
Maybe I missed something, but I seriously doubt that the Gore lackeys hand counting the votes would have missed "thousands of legitimate Gore votes". If he is referring to the over votes, then they were illegal and therefore illegitimate by definition.
I know that the popular vote count, at least, was actually much closer that reported. In California alone, there were hundreds of thousands of votes in the presidential election that were never counted at all by the democrapic state government.
The state started the official tally with those precincts that reported first, of course. It happens that nearly all of those precincts are in heavily democratic areas. When it became clear that Algore had enough votes in California to carry the state, they stopped tallying votes in the presidential race.
The precincts that were never counted were those reporting later, which just happened to be largely Republican.
Normally the media is quite pro-Democratic, but if indeed they are going to provide Al Gore numerous opportunities in the coming weeks to remind us all of his tale of woe, I think they'll be doing the party enormous harm. This last election should have settled the matter, even for Gore. It's time to go, Al. They bought the other car. |
I will try to remember his name so that I can ignore him in the future.
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Gore is like the salesman who keeps calling you after you've already bought the other guy's car. Once or twice, you understand it. You're polite, but you hang up. After two years of it, you're ready to call the cops, or the Men In The White Coats.