This is coming up in a lot of other threads, so I thought I'd give it its own home.

I've never been fully convinced of this notion. Obviously the Republicans were happy with the current results, but it still leaves a nasty taste in my mouth that the Democrats were only pursuing manual recounts in heavily Democratic counties. I've always interpreted the debacle as nasty politics on both sides. Typical politics.

to quote The Fonz ... "Correctamundo"

Full BBC Video on Florida: http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs ... palast.ram

The first interview is classic.

I also agree Democrats didn't fight nearly hard enough. Especially on the floor of the Senate. When we saw no one signing what many House members were trying to get across. An obvious theft of Florida. Then the handing of the Presidency to G.W. Bush. With quotes from Anthony Scalia on December 8th, four hours into the recount when Bush's lead had shrank to 534 votes, he is quoted as saying "We need to stop this recount otherwise it could cause irrepriable harm to petitioner G.W. Bush." Not to mention his son works for a legal firm representing Cheney/Bush.

who wants to be the first to point out that the BBC is also running documentaries calling al qaeda a figment of our imagination?

I do, I do.

Typical. Discredit, and not even view the 13 minute video. It's short enough to watch and attempt to counter any arguments you find off base or false. But I doubt you'll find any...won't know till ya watch.

Link?

Not that I don't trust you, given your impeccable record on being truthful about the facts.

I think the election wasn't stolen, it was forced to go Bush's way. It's pretty obvious that without Bush and his campaign staff paying people to look outraged for the cameras, flying lawyers all over the country. Having your brother be the governor, etc etc things may have gone differently. The Democrats just gave up, that was the beginning of the end for Daschle as any type of leader, he failed the party and the country.

I though it was...interesting...how the justices all flip-flopped from their normal stances in order to support their candidate. The states-rights justices(conservatives) suddenly favored federal intervention while the liberals suddenly became states-rights advocates. It was at that point that I became a libertarian forever.

to borrow IEB and Captain Planet's phrase, show me a link for the above bolded

It wasn't about the recount itself really, rather the 5 Supreme Court Justices, the ones usually in favor of state's rights, decided to turn it around and decide the election for themselves. This after Al Gore had recieved 500,000 more votes than Bush. Way to disenfranchise 1% of the voting population.

I think either way, one side was getting screwed. I say get over it, and learn from our mistake and fix the friggin' system.

It seemed way too convenient that Bush had all the right people in the perfect places. His brother, Kathleen Harris (working for his campaign), and his family friends on the Supreme Court to name a few.

I've always thought that the campaign devised some sort of "worst case scenario" plan ahead of time. They didn't like the way the exit polls looked, so they used Florida to win. It's pure speculation, but it's always felt right to me.

The real question is, has anyone fixed the problems with the Florida voting system???

"Jeb said he'd deliver Florida folks, and by did he ever." -Ani Di Franco.

I think Katherine Harris was the epitome of conflict of interest. She was the person in charge of elections statewide AND W's campaign manager. It's not about the recounts. The recounts are worth a few hundred votes. What it's about is Katherine's crew eliminating somewhere around 100,000 people from having the right to vote, based on having a similar name and birthdate to felons. It is estimated taht well over half of the people eliminated were not, in fact, felons. Lots of minorities were affected like this and for some strange reason, most minoritities did not vote for Bush.

The saddest thing is that nobody really cared. Least of all that wacky "liberal" media.

No.

[Link removed by Angela]

yea, thats a legit site

I think it was, at least to a degree. Even if it wasn't there are some very worrying, underhanded undemocratic things which happened and no doubt will again occur in this election.

Who here voted in Florida in 2000?

Ending a dangerous farce

Thomas Sowell
December 14, 2000

If the Supreme Court of the United States had not stepped in to stop the endless re-re-recounts in Florida, George W. Bush might have won a presidential election more times than Franklin D. Roosevelt -- and all in one year. What has been even worse than all the legal and political wrangling that has dragged on for weeks after the election is that there was no real basis for any of it. The Florida justices simply ignored the law in order to step in and impose their own ideas. It all started with Al Gore's flimsy excuses for doing manual recounts. After George W. Bush won the election in Florida and then won the official recount, Gore had to come up with something to cause a re-recount, under different rules.

First it was the "butterfly ballot" that was supposedly so "confusing" that you had to be a rocket scientist to figure it out. But vast numbers of Floridians had managed to vote for either Gore or Bush on these ballots, without being rocket scientists.

What allowed Al Gore to get a third bite at the apple was that it was within the discretion of the individual county election officials whether or not to order a manual recount when a candidate requested one. Candidates demand recounts where they lost, but Gore demanded a manual recount where he had won -- in heavily Democratic counties. Why? Because that was where he had the best chance of finding Democratic election officials likely to grant his request on flimsy grounds. Since Gore lost statewide, he could have asked for a recount in all 67 Florida counties, but that wasn't what he wanted.

What Gore wanted -- and got -- was a manual recount in a few Democratic strongholds, based on local Democratic officials' guesses as to what dimpled chads meant, while the vast majority of the counties in the state counted only clear perforations of the ballot as votes. That meant freezing Bush's slim majority vote totals in the rest of Florida, while allowing local Democrats in these few counties to go prospecting for more Gore "votes" by counting dents on the ballots as votes.

It is hard to imagine a more grossly unfair method of conducting a recount. Yet, when the Democrats still had not come up with enough new "votes" as the deadline for certifying the election approached, they asked Secretary of State Katherine Harris for an extension of the deadline. She declined to extend the deadline prescribed by law -- as the law gave her the discretion to do.

Now the Florida Supreme Court stepped in and transferred the discretion that the law gave to the Secretary of State to themselves, granting an extension. After the new extended deadline passed and the official election results were certified, the Gore legal team came back again to ask for another manual recount, under the rules for contesting a certification. However, as one of the dissenting justices on the Florida Supreme Court pointed out, "only the 'unsuccessful candidate' may contest an election," so "Vice President Gore's choices of the three particular counties was improper because he was not 'unsuccessful' in those counties."

Not to worry. The 4-3 majority on the Florida Supreme Court now ordered a statewide recount. Based on what? Not on the law, according to the court's own chief justice, who dissented bitterly. That's where the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in. What the Florida Supreme Court did at the eleventh hour might have made some sense as a remedy weeks earlier, when there was plenty of time -- if there had been anything to remedy, which there wasn't.

Nothing had happened in the Florida election that does not happen in other elections. Voter error, voter omission of votes for some offices ("undervotes") and trivial irregularities are commonplace, despite all the hype and hysteria in Florida. The Florida Supreme Court rushed in to solve a non-problem -- and their "solution" created a mess that threatened a constitutional crisis.

Before the U. S. Supreme Court intervened, a team of professors from Harvard, Berkeley, Cornell and Northwestern universities did their own detailed statistical analysis and concluded that Bush might win the latest recount by a larger margin than he won the first time.

The real issue, however, was not whether Bush would have won yet again in the latest in a series of recounts. The real issue was whether this kind of perversion of the law was to be allowed to continue -- and to provide a precedent for chaos after every future close election.

http://www.townhall.com/columnists/thom ... 1214.shtml