The goddamn Democrats wanted to have two Democrats and one Republican sit at a table and review ballots and then vote on the intent of the voter. How dishonest was was that?
It wasn't. I've worked in the polls in Florida. At no point is anyone asked what party they're in.
Good thing the Supremes put an end to that shit or that Loony Tune Gore would have been President.
That had nothing to do with the decision. Do you ever get anything right?
Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), was a
landmark decision of the
United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in
Florida's 2000 presidential election between
George W. Bush and
Al Gore. On December 8, the
Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all
undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. Justice
Antonin Scalia, convinced that all the manual recounts being performed in Florida's counties were illegitimate, urged his colleagues to grant the stay immediately.
[1] On December 9, the five conservative justices on the Court granted the stay, with Scalia citing "irreparable harm" that could befall Bush, as the recounts would cast "a needless and unjustified cloud" over Bush's legitimacy. In dissent, Justice
John Paul Stevens wrote that "counting every legally cast vote cannot constitute irreparable harm."
[1] Oral arguments were scheduled for December 11.
In a 5–4
per curiam decision, the Court ruled, strictly on equal protection grounds, that the recount be stopped. Specifically, it held that the use of different standards of counting in different counties violated the
Equal Protection Clause of the
U.S. Constitution; the case had also been argued on
Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor with only Justices
Antonin Scalia,
Clarence Thomas, and
William Rehnquist. The Court then ruled as to a remedy, deciding against the remedy proposed by Justices
Stephen Breyer and
David Souter to send the case back to Florida to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard before the scheduled December 18 meeting of Florida's electors in
Tallahassee.
[1] Instead, the majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 "
safe harbor" deadline set by
Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.),
§ 5, which the Florida Supreme Court had stated that the Florida Legislature intended to meet.
[2] That deadline arrived two hours after the release of the Court's decision. The Court, holding that not meeting the "safe harbor" deadline would therefore violate the Florida Election Code, rejected an extension of the deadline.
The Supreme Court's decision in
Bush v. Gore was among the most controversial in U.S. history, as it allowed the vote certification made by
Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to stand, giving Bush Florida's 25
electoral votes. Florida's votes gave Bush, the
Republican nominee, 271 electoral votes, one more than the 270 required to win the Electoral College. This meant the defeat of
Democratic candidate Al Gore, who won 267 electoral votes but received 266, as a "
faithless elector" from the
District of Columbia abstained from voting. Media organizations later analyzed the ballots and found that, under specified criteria, the originally pursued recount of undervotes of several large counties would have confirmed a Bush victory, whereas a statewide recount would have resulted in a Gore victory. Florida later retired the punch-card
voting machines that produced the ballots disputed in the case.
[3][4][5]
AND
Decision
In brief, the breakdown of the decision was:
- Five justices agreed that there was an Equal Protection Clause violation in using differing standards of determining a valid vote in different counties, causing an "unequal evaluation of ballots in various respects".[33] The per curiamopinion (representing the views of Justices Kennedy, O'Connor, Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) specifically cited that:
- Palm Beach County changed standards for counting dimpled chads several times during the counting process;
- Broward County used less restrictive standards than Palm Beach County;
- Miami-Dade County's recount of rejected ballots did not include all precincts;
- The Florida Supreme Court did not specify who would recount the ballots.
- The per curiam opinion also identified an inconsistency with the fact that the Florida statewide recount of rejected ballots was limited to undervotes. The opinion implied that a constitutionally valid recount would include Florida's overvotes, not just its undervotes. The opinion expressed concern that the limited scope of Florida's recount would mean that, unlike some undervotes found to be reclaimable, valid votes among the overvotes would not be reclaimed.[a] Furthermore, if a machine had incorrectly read an overvote as a valid vote for one of two marked candidates instead of rejecting it, Florida would wrongly count what should be an invalid vote.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#cite_note-39
[*]Breyer and Souter disagreed with the majority, pointing out that Bush presented no evidence in any court of uncounted legal overvotes and did not see any problem in Florida's decision to limit its recount to undervotes.[38][39][40] The dissents of Breyer and Souter were full dissents. Unlike the five-justice majority, each identified an equal protection concern that did not rise to the level of a constitutional violation, and proposed a remedy different from the majority's remedy. A dissenting opinion does not create precedent nor does it become a part of case law. Under the American legal system, dissenting court opinions are not considered valid holdings and are not included in the court's ruling. Nothing in Breyer's or Souter's dissents can be construed as part of any decision by the Court.
[*]In dissenting, Ginsburg wrote that, for better or worse, disparities were a part of all elections and that if an equal-protection argument applied in any way, it surely applied more to black voters.[1]
[*]Five justices agreed that December 12 (the date of the decision) was the deadline Florida had established for recounts in keeping with 3 U.S.C. §5 (Rehnquist,[41] O'Connor, Scalia, Kennedy, and Thomas in support; Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer opposed). Souter, joined by Breyer, Ginsburg and Stevens, wrote, "But no State is required to conform to §5 if it cannot do that (for whatever reason); the sanction for failing to satisfy the conditions of §5 is simply loss of what has been called its 'safe harbor.' And even that determination is to be made, if made anywhere, in the Congress."[39] Souter and Breyer would have remanded the case to the Florida Supreme Court to permit that court to establish uniform standards of what constituted a legal vote for a manual recount of all rejected ballots using those standards.[38][39]
[*]Three justices (Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas) argued that the Florida Supreme Court had acted contrary to the intent of the Florida legislature. Four (Stevens, Souter, Ginsburg, and Breyer) specifically disputed this in their dissenting opinions, and the remaining two (O'Connor and Kennedy) declined to join Rehnquist's concurrence on the matter.[41]
- ^ Unknown at the time, but observed in the later media recounts, there was a significant number of such valid overvotes found among the rejected ballots in optical scan counties, which largely favored Gore.
- ^ The opinion does not suggest a practical method for searching for and manually identifying such ballots among the thousands of legally cast and counted ballots with which they would be mixed.[34][35][36][37]
An undervote is a ballot with less than the maximum number of votes cast and is allowed. An overvote is a ballot that has more votes cast than are allowed. Overvoted ballots are disqualified.
Bush was a RINO and did a lot of harmful things to this country like the Iraqi invasion and letting Illegals flood in. However, compared to that dimwit Gore and that traitor Kerry he was a saint.
Gore is like the father of this silly ass AGW scam. What a dickhead! However, he did get richer with the scam. There are big bucks to be had scamming the Environmental Wacko business.
