Let's try take the politics out of this whole Florida deal and make an attempt to look at it objectively.
What the hell is going on in Florida? Is Gore trying to steal the election? Is Bush trying to prevent the vote from being counted? Are votes being thrown away, or are people trying to create votes out of thin air? The answer you give to that question largely depends on one simple fact - whether you are a Republican or a Democrat. But why? An election count is a matter of mathematics, and mathematics is a matter of fact - not opinion. How have the politicians turned it into a subjective event? The count should be something that the partisans can debate, should it? You should be able to simply add up the votes and declare a winner.
If an election is not supposed to be subjective, how has is become so? An election isn't a matter of opinion. Unless there is actually a tie, one of these two guys is the winner, which of course means the other is the loser. But somehow, both parties are proclaiming themselves the victor. This simply cannot be true. IT defies the basic laws of mathematics. Only one of them can be right. But the whole question of right and wrong has been lost in the cloud of partisanship.
So what do we do? We have to pick one of these guys as the winner, but who do we choose? The only way to find the true answer is to take "partisanship" completely out of the mix, which of course, is very difficult to do. Even a non-partisan person like myself (ha!) finds it difficult to raise his head above the partisan fog. Nevertheless, let's try to forget all about Republicans and Democrats for the next few moments. Forget about Al Gore and George Bush. Forget all about their politics for next few moments. Let's imagine that all of this was going on someplace else - in some other country.
Imaging that this mythical third world nation has just held an election. It was a very close election, but it would appear that the ruling party of has just lost the presidency. This loss of the executive branch is a devastating blow to the ruling party. Losing this election would effectively put and end to this party's hold on any branch of federal government. (Their 42-year hold on the House of Representatives came to an end just 6 years prior) They would still hold a very strong position of opposition, but that is of little consolation. For the first time in decades, they will have no way to push through their agenda - not power to veto legislation - nothing but the power to filibuster. Of course, the ruling party does NOT want this to happen. They are willing to do whatever it takes to change the outcome of this election and hold on to their power.
This was a very close election. And since this was a very close election, the law in this country mandates that there be a recount of the votes. There is a chance that a second count could show a result that is different from the first, but no luck. No matter how many times they count the ballots, the results are the same. The numbers don't lie. They have lost this election, and they know it. Unless the ruling party takes some sort of special action, they will (for all intents and purposes) be ousted from government for at least the next two years, and perhaps, even longer.
They know that a third count (a second re-count) will probably only confirm the results of the first two counts. Sure, it's possible that if you count enough times, eventually you may have an error that changes the outcome of the election in your favor. But there is no way to know for sure that a third count will be any more accurate (or inaccurate, as the case may be) than the first two. Candidates occasionally will request a recount of the ballots, just to make sure the machines didn't screw up. But overall, recounts rarely change the outcome of an election. The only time a recount will make a difference is if there was something actually wrong with the first count... An adding error - A machine malfunction - misplaced ballots... These are the types of things that may change the outcome of a recount. But this election had none of those things - at least, not enough to change the outcome of the election. In order to win, the ruling party needs to find another way to "tweak" the election results. They come up with a plan.
It's a known fact that voting machines routinely reject ballots that are not punched correctly. There is a whole host of ways that a voter can foul up their ballot. If somebody didn't follow the instructions and insert the card into the machine correctly, the reader won’t read their vote. If they failed to punch completely through the ballot card the machines won't pick up their vote. But, in general, the voting process is so simple that most people don't have a problem with it. Ballots are rejected all across the country, in every precinct, for the similar reasons. On average, about 1% to 2% of the vote is routinely thrown out because people simply didn't take the time to fill out the ballots correctly. It's sad that some ballots are thrown out, but that's the way it goes.
And before this election, nobody really seemed to care. It just never really mattered before because, statistically, it is just as likely for a one party's ballot to be thrown out as another party's ballot. In the end, it generally has no effect on the outcome whatsoever. It simply goes against the odds for voters from one party to screw up their ballots more often than voters from another party. Unless you want to make the assertion that the supporters of one party are simply dumber than the supporters of another party - and are therefore more likely to screw up the ballot - hand-counting all of the ballots will not make a damn bit of difference.
Generally, the only time that a recount will even be requested is when the race is extremely close - when the vote is pretty much split 50-50. But, if there was a way to count all of these bad ballots, odds are that the additional votes would also be split 50-50. Sure, you'll get more votes if you count the ballots by hand - But so will your opponent. In the end, it isn't going to change the outcome of the election. And if it doesn't change the outcome, what's the point?
But there is a clever way around this problem. If you only recount areas that are firmly in your control - counties where almost two thirds of the residents voted for your party - odds are that most of the "bad" votes will also be for your party. By recounting in areas that supported your party by a 2:1 ratio, you pretty much guarantee that all of the "recovered" votes will also follow that ratio, with your guy getting about 66% of the new votes. You're not going to get many votes this way, but since this was a close election, it just might give you enough to change the sway the outcome in your favor.
So that's what the ruling party does. Out of the 67 counties in the state, they chose the four counties that supported their candidate by the largest margins. At first glance, it may seem odd to ask for recounts in counties that you have already won, but as we can see, the motives behind this logic are crystal clear.
There are some additional reasons for recounting in counties that support your party. Counties that supported your party in the national election also tend to support your party in local elections. So, as one might suspect, members of the ruling party run the election boards. These party members are - by law - the people who will be judging weather or not to count each "questionable" ballot as a vote - and whom to cast that for. And, as an added bonus, judges from your party also populate the courts in these counties. So, when the opposition party tries to question the ruling party’s actions, the deck will be stacked against them. The ruling party knows that their judges will have no problem shooting down any legal arguments against these selective recounts, because technically, they aren't against the law.
And so the recounts begin. Of course, the opposition party throws a fit, but the ruling party brushes it off. They send out their propaganda ministers to claim that they are simply to make sure that "all the votes are counted", even though they know they are doing nothing of the sort. And after all, their claims aren't completely baseless. There were a lot of ballots rejected by the machines in these counties. But if you really examine their claim, it doesn't hold up. If they were really so concerned about votes being rejected they would have also asked for recounts in the 32 counties that had a higher percentage of rejected ballots than the counties they selected. But, they didn't. The number of rejected votes had nothing to do with it - except of course, that most of the rejected votes in those counties would probably end up being counted as votes for them. They selected these counties for a reason, and that reason should be obvious to anybody.
Of course, the media chose not to focus on these facts. In order to distract the people's attention away from these facts, they run around making allegations of "voting irregularities" to try to imply that it is in fact the opposition party that had propagated some sort of fraud. Even though the only "shady" behavior was perpetrated by members of their own party. To cite some examples:
The ruling party sent people to "little Havana" - an area full of Cuban immigrants - to "assist" them in voting. They would follow the voters into the voting booths and tell them who to vote for. Of course, this activity was in clear violation of several election laws - laws preventing party members from interfering with voters at the polling place.
In St. Louis, the ruling party allowed thousands of unregistered voters to vote on Election Day. Plus, they kept the polls open past the statutory closing time to make sure all of these the people could vote. (And of course, the only counties that were kept open were those that tended to favor the ruling party.)
A local news team videotaped members of the ruling party bribing Homeless people into voting for their candidate by offering free cigarettes. (In case anybody wasn't aware, it is illegal to pays somebody to vote a certain way.)
You can bet that if members of the opposition party perpetrated any of these acts, they would have been front-page stories. But since it wasn't, these events received little if any attention by the national media. The state media simply brushed these events aside, instead deciding to focus more on the ruling party's claim that some voters were "tricked" in voting for another candidate by a confusing ballots. - Which is ridiculous since the ballot was designed and approved by members of their own party. And in any case, ballots similar to this one have been years for many years all around the country - in hundreds of precincts. Yet, they only place where its use is questioned it in this on country - and it is only questioned after the election was over. Despite all of this, this one allegation received far more coverage than all other acts of fraud combined.
The primary reason for all of this "extra" news coverage was the fact that these counties are populated by a lot of racial minorities. This fact enabled the ruling party to claim that all of these votes were rejected because of racism. Of course, claiming that the voting machines are even capable of being "racists" is downright absurd, especially when the people operating the machines are members of their own party! A white member of the ruling party is NOT going to stop a black person from voting for them. But, minorities (which traditionally support the ruling party by a 10 to 1 margin) eat this garbage up, and begin marching in the street - protesting that the opposition party is somehow violating their “civil rights”. And the media is more than happy to broadcast every moment of it.
Meanwhile, the counties continue their hand recounts, trying as hard as they can to get just enough votes to overturn the election. When they discover that they won't get enough votes by only counting "hanging chads" (the standard that had been used for over a decade), they simply change the rules. They change the rules to make is easier to "infer" these damaged ballots as votes. They go as far to allow "dimpled chads" - slight indentations on the chad, or any mark remotely close to it - to be counted as votes for their candidate.
One can speculate on many ways that these "dimpled chads" were created. -- The ballot could have been incorrectly inserted into the machine Or maybe the voter may have stuck the stylus into the slot, then changed his mind. Perhaps the ballot was nicked by another ballot when it was being stuck in the ballot box. -- You can come up with a whole host of scenarios to explain how those dimples were created, but most of them involve situations where the voter did not vote! Yet, the local officials change the rules to permit these votes to be counted anyway. And every time they change the rules, they find more and more votes for the Vice President.
As a side note, let's suppose that military in our imaginary country was not happy with the ruing party. Overall, military personnel tended to vote 2:1 for the opposition party. Would it really come as a surprise that as many as 75% of the ballots cast by overseas military personnel are rejected? And of course, they are rejected at the behest of the ruling party, which sent out memos to all of the counties explaining all of the legal ways to throw these ballots out. Here are some of the ways these ballots were rejected:
Local election laws dictate that all absentee ballots be postmarked prior to election day. However, this conflicts with military codes which prohibits (for reasons of secrecy, and for lack of equipment) postmarking mail sent by soldiers serving overseas.
Local laws also require that the date be written on the absentee ballots. The only problem is that the ballots did not ask for the date, and gave no indication that the date is required.
The ballots require that you have your ballot signed by a witness, and that witness must sign with his/her name and address. But when you're in the field, what is your address?... the 3rd foxhole to the right?
Out of all of the reasons listed here, only the last one may be considered to have any merit since it is the only problem that is caused by the voter himself. The others cannot. It isn't the voter’s fault that the military post office didn't postmark the ballots, or that that the instructions didn't inform them a date was necessary. And the fact that the ruling party was trying to use these excuses to throw their votes only served to increase the resentment between the military and the ruling party. More and more military officers went public to express their "outrage" and "disgust" for the ruling party, and for the vice president. They start appearing in television interviews, to let the whole nation know how the ruling party had "ripped them off". Of course, all of this did not sit well with some of the powers that be. As a result, military lawyers began threatening the personnel with article 88 of the military code, which states:
"any commissioned officer who uses contemptuous words against the president, vice president ... governor or legislature shall be punished as a court-martial may direct."
Knowing that this could result in up to a year in prison, or at the very least the end of their military careers, this threat is enough convince most personnel to keep their mouth shut.
Yet, at the same time the party is fighting to have these ballots thrown out on technicalities, they are suing to have more and more ballots for their candidate accepted. During the course of these manual recounts, even more evidence surfaces of outright voter fraud. Ballots that are cast for one of the smaller opposition parties are being "inferred" as a vote for the vice president. Some of the ballots have been taped over, covering votes cast for the opposition candidate. The floors of the counting rooms are littered with chads - there are even reports of some vote counters eating the chads. Some ballots that had been rejected earlier are now counted, and the vice president's vote tally continues to rise as he inches closer and closer to overcoming the opposition candidate's lead.
Now say the law in this country requires a final vote tally seven days after the election. The primary purpose of this law is to prevent manipulation of the final vote tally after the election result is already known. But at the 11th hour before the final vote tally was to be certified - certified in accordance with long-standing law - what happens?
The Supreme Court of the state, controlled by the vice president's party, stepped in on its own accord (which is virtually unheard of) to change the rules to further help their candidate. They order the recount to continue, despite the irregularities and fraud, and prevent the opposition candidate from being declared the winner.
This legal circus continues for weeks after the election. At no moment does the ruling party pull ahead in the vote, yet they still went on proclaiming that they were the "rightful" winners of the election. They dismiss the fact that the opposition party has won every single count of the vote, and continue to insist that they will win once "all the votes have been counted".
Just think about it. What would the U.S. do if this kind of thing was happening in another country? If all the questionable tactics being carried out in Florida were going on in Serbia, we would be bombing them by now. And as chance would have it, Serbia did recently experience a problem similar to this just last year. And just as in the recent situation in Serbia, the ruling party has refused to accept the result of an election and is calling for a new election and/and or recount (and a re-recount, and a re-re-recount) in order to hold on to their power.
Luckily for Serbia, Milosevic, under increasing pressure from the rest of the world, backed down after only a few days. If Slobodan Milosevic had carried it on his games for as long as Gore has, the U.S. would have done everything in its power to put an end to it -- UN Sanctions -- Naval Blockades -- Bombs whizzing past the presidential palace.
When this type of thing goes on in some other part of the world, the U.S. government is the first to step in and defend "Democracy". So it causes one to ask, why isn't anybody condemning what's going on in Florida?
Well, actually, there are a few people out there condemning these actions - They are called Republicans. And because of this, the media dismisses most of their arguments as pure "partisanship".
But this isn't just partisan "spin". These are the facts. There isn't much room for dispute. Unlike most of everything else that goes on in politics, these are provable facts. Elections aren't some sort of economic projection, environmental or cultural theory, or some sort of "fuzzy math". Everything I have stated here is a fact, except, or course, the fact that this isn't happening in some 3rd world banana republic. This is happening in our own country.
The underlining truth - that the Democrats are trying to steal this election - should be obvious to anybody, not just Republicans. And if the polls are correct, at least 2/3 of the public would appear to agree with me. Al Gore lost the election and is doing everything he can to change that fact. The obviousness of what's happening is so clear, one can only wonder why the other 1/3 of the American public still doesn't see anything wrong with what Al Gore is doing. How they are coming to this conclusion is a complete mystery to me. I can only surmise that they have either been living on another planet for the last few weeks or have been to busy watching "Buffy" and "Baywatch" re-runs to actually pay attention to the situation. - Or perhaps they simply don't care. Perhaps they believe that Al Gore's apparent victory in the popular vote gives him the moral authority to do whatever it takes to win the election.
But those of us living outside of New York, Chicago, and LA take issue with that opinion. The Electoral College exists for a reason - and that reason is to prevent a few small regions of the country from ruling the rest of the country. In case you haven't noticed, the name of our country is the United States of America. We are a union of individual state, and those states form the basis of all federal power. The entire system of our federal government represents a compromise against the power of the large states, and the interest of the smaller (yet more numerous) states. We elect two Senators from each state, regardless of the state’s population. California, for example, has one Senator for every 16.2 million citizens, whereas Wyoming has one for every 212,000 people. Does anybody complain about the fact that a Wyoming citizen has 7600% more Senators per capita than California? The House of Representatives offsets this inequity by basing each states representation according to its population, but inequities still exist none the less. However, nobody seems to be too concerned about all this inequity in Congress.
The Electoral collage is simply a combination of these two systems, with each state receiving 1 electoral vote for each of its congressmen. Yet, when this same system is used to elect the head of the executive branch, people whine about how unfair it is. The president is supposed to represent the interests of all various regions of this nation, and the electoral collage helps to ensure that he does.
And in this election, the states have decided that the democrats no longer represent their interests. The Democratic Party has controlled the executive branch of the United States for eight years. It's 42-year-long rule on the House was put to an end 6 years ago. In fact, you would have to go back to the 83rd congress (1953-1955) to find the last time that the Republicans had control of both houses of congress and the presidency. But even then their hold was not absolute, since they only possessed a 1-seat lead in the Senate, and that lead didn't last very long. Nine Senators died over the course of those two years, causing the majority to shift back and forth between the two parties several times, and at the end of the term, it was the Democrats that held a 1-seat majority. In order to find the last time that the Republicans had solid two years of firm control, you would have to go back to the presidency of Herbert Hoover and the 71st congress (1929-1931).
In the years following Hoover, the Democrats have pretty much had the run the federal government. Over that 70-year period, they've held the executive branch for 42 years, the Senate for 52 years, and have dominated the House for 60 years. In fact, they have had absolute rule (holding all three bodies simultaneously) 28 out of the last 70 years (1933-1947; 1951-1953; 1961-1969; 1977-1981). Loosing this election is a major blow to their pride. Excluding that two-year hiccup in 1953-1955, this will be the first time since the Great Depression that Democratic Party has lost all of its power.
To make the situation even more serious, this election appears to have left the Senate split 50-50. The party that wins the presidency will get to cast the tie-breaking vote in the Senate. Not only will this election decide the who our next president will be, this election will decide which party controls the Senate as well... at least for while. As in 1953, we can expect this ratio to change several times in the next two years as Senators die off. And the two of the most likely candidates for "terminal retirement" are 98-year-old Strom Thurmond and 79-year-old Jesse Helms. Both of these men are from states with Democratic governors, therefore will most likely be replaced by Democrats. But you never know. There are many Senators past the "average" life expectancy, so it's really impossible to predict how the death card will be dealt.
You can rely on one thing for sure - The Democrats aren't going to put their political future in the hands of fate. They have absolutely no intention of sitting by and watching the reigns of power slip from their fingers into the hands of the opposition party. They are going to use ever means at their disposal to fight this thing to the very end. At times, the battle may seem hopeless for them. But that isn't going to phase them. They know that even if their attempts to hold onto their power ultimately fail, they will be able to take comfort in the fact that they have succeeded in casting doubt (at least in the minds of some) of the legitimacy of opposition party's rule. And, they hope, enough voters will buy into it to put the them back into power in two years.
On the other hand, there is a real chance they might actually win this election through the courts. Although the executive branch has already certified George Bush as the winner, no judge in the judicial branch seems willing to put a stop to all of these legal games. The local courts have been more than willing to allow the counties to count the ballots over and over again. The state's "7-day deadline" could have stopped Al Gore in his tracks, but the liberal judges on the Florida Supreme Court decided instead to "interpret" that 7-day limit as actually meaning "19-days" - apparently deciding to interpret their own meaning of the word "interpret" as well. The federal Supreme Court, which was be the first "conservative" judicial body to hear the case, stated that they don't understand why the Florida Supreme ruled as they did. They have asked that the Florida court to explain legal basis for their decision, which would seem to indicate that they didn't agree with the decision, but they haven't exactly overturned the Florida court as of yet.
The votes in Florida have been counted three times, and each time the tally has indicated that Bush was the winner. The Executive branch (which has the sole power to certify those election results) has declared Bush the winner. However, the Judicial Branch, which has the power to interpret the laws created by the legislature, has decided to rewrite the rules after the election. The decisions made by the courts may end up giving the victory to Gore. And even though 2/3 of the public would question the legitimacy of such a victory, the next election is two years away. The attention span of the American voter is about as long as the life expectancy of your average housefly. In two years, all of Gore's actions will be ancient history.
One can only hope that if Gore is successful in his quest to skew the election results in his favor, the Florida State Legislature - the only body with the constitutional authority to choose the electors - will step in prevent that from happening. But there is no guarantee that they will do that, since the Republicans in the legislature may be afraid that it may come back to haunt them - and rightly so. They know that the Democrats would have no problem spinning this thing around and beating them over the head with it. If Gore can manage to squeeze a few wins out of the legal system and put himself ahead in the vote - even for one brief moment - the propaganda ministers of the Democratic Party will proclaim that count to be the one and only "true" count. They will proclaim that "the will of the People" has finally been heard, and if the evil Republican Legislators do anything to take that victory away from them, they will be hung out to dry. The Democrats will accuse them of abusing their power to "overturn" the election results. (Just ignore the fact that the first 3 counts has shown Bush to be the winner - the only count that can possibly be correct is one that shows Al Gore to be the winner)
The "impartial" media will be more than willing to help the democrats perpetuate this fallacy to the masses. (I put the word "impartial" in quotes, since most polls show that as many as 9 out of 10 journalist vote for Democrats - a fact I have often attributed to the artistic love for fantasy & fiction, something that the Democrats have plenty of.) They will imply that Bush has somehow manipulated the system in order to steal the White House. - When in fact, we all know that the opposite is true. Ever since Election Day, it has been the Gore team that has been perpetrating that very thing - stealing the election.
And, so far, the courts in this country have been letting him get away with it. That's OK, a third of the public doesn't seem to care either. And as for the rest of the nations of the world, they know better than to stick their nose in our business. - Despite the fact that the U.S. does it to them all of the time. Maybe they should intervene, but without the leadership of the U.S., they aren't gonna do a damn thing. They are more than happy to sit back watch this thing from the sidelines.
They know that a third count (a second re-count) will probably only confirm the results of the first two counts. Sure, it's possible that if you count enough times, eventually you may have an error that changes the outcome of the election in your favor. But there is no way to know for sure that a third count will be any more accurate (or inaccurate, as the case may be) than the first two. Candidates occasionally will request a recount of the ballots, just to make sure the machines didn't screw up. But overall, recounts rarely change the outcome of an election. The only time a recount will make a difference is if there was something actually wrong with the first count... An adding error - A machine malfunction - misplaced ballots... These are the types of things that may change the outcome of a recount. But this election had none of those things - at least, not enough to change the outcome of the election. In order to win, the ruling party needs to find another way to "tweak" the election results. They come up with a plan.
Meanwhile, the counties continue their hand recounts, trying as hard as they can to get just enough votes to overturn the election. When they discover that they won't get enough votes by only counting "hanging chads" (the standard that had been used for over a decade), they simply change the rules. They change the rules to make is easier to "infer" these damaged ballots as votes. They go as far to allow "dimpled chads" - slight indentations on the chad, or any mark remotely close to it - to be counted as votes for their candidate. 
As a side note, let's suppose that military in our imaginary country was not happy with the ruing party. Overall, military personnel tended to vote 2:1 for the opposition party. Would it really come as a surprise that as many as 75% of the ballots cast by overseas military personnel are rejected? And of course, they are rejected at the behest of the ruling party, which sent out memos to all of the counties explaining all of the legal ways to throw these ballots out. Here are some of the ways these ballots were rejected:
And in this election, the states have decided that the democrats no longer represent their interests. The Democratic Party has controlled the executive branch of the United States for eight years. It's 42-year-long rule on the House was put to an end 6 years ago. In fact, you would have to go back to the 83rd congress (1953-1955) to find the last time that the Republicans had control of both houses of congress and the presidency. But even then their hold was not absolute, since they only possessed a 1-seat lead in the Senate, and that lead didn't last very long. Nine Senators died over the course of those two years, causing the majority to shift back and forth between the two parties several times, and at the end of the term, it was the Democrats that held a 1-seat majority. In order to find the last time that the Republicans had solid two years of firm control, you would have to go back to the presidency of Herbert Hoover and the 71st congress (1929-1931).