(WalterM140) wrote in message ...
Bush was not elected. He was appointed. We'll fix that in November.



Elected by the Congress, like all Presidents in a joint session that
most Americans regard as a formality if they know about it at all.

Michael Moore uses some footage in "Fahrenheit 911" from the 2000 certification
of Florida's elctoral votes in the Senate. They could have been challenged if
any one senator had agreed to co-sign the documentation provided by black
members of Congress.

My recollection from 2001 (which could be wrong) was that every Democratic
Congressman from FL got up and voiced an objection.

The reason no Senator signed on to the objection was becuase Al Gore
did not want any Senator to do so. As you know, Joe Lieberman, his
vice presidential cadidate, was a Senator.


Since you seem pretty familiar with this, what do you think about the rationale
the Supreme Court used to close out the Florida recount?

IMHO, the USSC ruled correctly that the differences in voting
technology and variation standards for acceptance of a ballot
from one county to the next in FL violated the equal protection
clause of the 14th amendment.

In view of that, it made no sense to enjoin FL from attempting to
remedy the error.


My understanding is that the Court has usually deferred to state courts in
interpreting state constitutions. But here, they took the issue away from the
state court and basically declared Bush the winner.

The 14th amendment quit eclearly trumps state constitutions. It is one
area where the USSC clearly can and should, if necessary, overule
the state courts.


In "F-911" you can hear Congresswoman Corrine Brown say that 16,000 of her
constituents had been illegally disinfranchised in Duvall County.

I don't know her basis for that statement. The post-election examination
of the undervoted and overvoted ballots found that few of them had
anything that could be reasonably interpreted as the clear intent of
the voter by any objective standard. Fewer than 1500 throughout the
entire state where there were perhaps 100,000 under and/or overvoted
ballots in total.

If the objective standard used to determine the clear intent of the
voter required at least one of the four corners of the chad to
be broken then the post election showed that Bush won the vote by
approximately (just a tiny bit less IIRC) the same as the margin
at the time the USSC closed the show down. However, if 'dimpled'
chads were interpreted as indicating the clear intent of the voter
then Gore would have won by a very small margin. One should consider
how a chad gets to be dimpled. If the ejection port under the chad
on a votamatic becomes clogged with accumulated chads then it may
become impossible to press the chad down far enough to seperate the
corners resulting in a dimpled chad. It seems reasonable to suppose
that the ejection ports under those chads that are being punched out
most often will be most likely to become plugged. So it may be
that the votomatics discriminate slightly against whoever is
getting the most votes.

This is from an article in the Washington Post published about
6 months into 2001.

One Republican dominated county used a two-page ballot for the
Presidential candidates and that county had the highest rate of
rejected ballots due ot overvotes. Up to 15% of the voters
had voted for President on page 1, and voted for president again
on page 2.

As in the country at large there is no clear answer to the question
who won the popular vote in Florida, let alone who would have won
absent mechanical malfunctions and voter error.

The person the Congress says is the winner becomes President on
inaguration day.

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FF