-Caveat Lector-
[Good summary. --MS]
WASHINGTON, Dec. 12 — In a mixed ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court
on Tuesday sent the presidential election dispute back to
Florida’s high court for more work on the disputed ballots and
recount procedures.
ALL THE JUSTICES agreed the recount procedure presented problems,
but they did not agree on what remedy should be taken.
At issue were about 43,000 so-called undervotes — ballots
in which voting machines read no selection for president. Gore
believed that a hand recount of the ballots would have uncovered
enough votes for him to overtake Bush and win the decisive state.
The court’s decision doesn’t completely eliminate Gore’s
chances of capturing the White House, because other legal
challenges to Florida’s election results — actions to which the
vice president is not a party — still are pending. But before the
ruling, even Gore’s strongest supporters acknowledged that an
adverse ruling by the nation’s highest court would be the end of
the line.
“There would be no alternative” but to concede if the
court comes down firmly against the vice president, one aide told
NBC News on Monday.
Several key Democratic lawmakers, including House Minority
Leader Richard Gephardt, were publicly quoted as saying Gore
should abandon his legal fight if the Supreme Court ruled against
him.
While the court effectively ended the legal battle for the
nation’s highest elective office, its decision is unlikely to
quickly bridge the gulf in the electorate that the dispute has
caused.
POLL FINDS DIVIDED NATION
According to an NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll released
Monday night, 55 percent of Americans now believe the nation will
“remain divided” over the next four years — regardless of who
wins the presidential contest.
The poll also showed that 52 percent said they would be
skeptical about the job Bush would do as president, and 54
percent said the same of Gore. But a majority said they would be
comfortable with either man and willing to support the winner —
60 percent for Gore, 66 percent for Bush.
The margin of error for the poll ranged from 2.2 to 2.5
percentage points; 2,107 people responded. The court’s ruling
came as the GOP-dominated Florida Legislature was preparing to
step into the dispute. The lawmakers were meeting in a special
session with the intention of naming a slate of electors to the
Electoral College pledged to support Bush.
It was not immediately clear whether the Legislature would
call off its special session in light of the court’s ruling.
Florida already has certified a slate of electors for
Bush, but if another pending legal action — a few still are
unresolved — was to result in a Gore victory, the Florida Supreme
Court still could order Secretary of State Katherine Harris to
certify Florida’s 25 electoral votes for Gore.
ECHOES OF TILDEN VS. HAYES
The election battle between Bush and Gore has been the most
contentious presidential contest of modern times. Not since the
election of 1876, when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes defeated
Samuel Tilden after a post-vote legal struggle that dragged on
into February of the following year — has the nation seen
anything like it.
The controversy erupted even before the polls closed in
Florida on Nov. 7, as all the major television networks projected
that Gore the winner of Florida’s critical 25 electoral votes
before pulling back several hours later and returning the state
to the too-close-to-call column.
Watch the latest NBC and MSNBC reports on the Florida
presidential dispute.
The flip-flopping was repeated early the next morning,
but in reverse. This time the networks gave the state to Bush,
leading Gore to phone the Texas governor at 3 a.m. and concede.
He retracted his congratulatory call an hour later after the
networks again returned the state to undecided status after
Bush’s minuscule margin of victory — 1,784 votes out of more than
6 million cast — triggered an automatic recount. After the
ballots were again run through tabulation machines, that margin
had shriveled to fewer than 200 votes, according to an unofficial
tally by The Associated Press.
RECOUNTS SOUGHT IN 4 COUNTIES
Amid allegations of voting irregularities — including an
outcry over a “butterfly ballot” in Palm Beach County that
Democrats charged was confusing — Gore’s campaign requested hand
recounts of about 1.8 million ballots in four predominantly
Democratic counties — Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach and
Volusia.
In response, Bush’s lawyers opened the legal floodgates by
filing the first post-election lawsuit on Nov. 11, asking a U.S.
District Court judge in Miami to block the requested recounts.
The judge declined to intervene two days later, a decision that
Bush’s team appealed to the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals
in Atlanta.
The Florida Supreme Court got involved in the case on
Nov. 17. Acting in response to a lawsuit by Volusia County
seeking additional time to complete its hand recount, the court’s
seven justices barred Harris from certifying the statewide
results, as she had planned to do on Nov. 18, while they studied
the issue. Four days later, the court ruled that the recounts
could proceed and should be included in the final tally. It set a
Nov. 26 deadline for completion of the recounts.
For five days, the nation watched as Florida elections
workers and observers from both parties squinted at and debated
over ballots, attempting to discern the intent of the voters who
cast them. Efforts to understand the process led inexorably to
the lexicon of “chads,” the tiny bits of ballot paper that can
remain behind in “dimpled,” “hinged,” “pregnant” or “dangling”
form.
Meanwhile, the legal battle escalated and spread. The U.S.
Supreme Court agreed to hear Bush’s appeal challenging the state
court’s ruling allowing manual recounts and extending the
certification deadline. Democratic voters in Seminole county
challenged absentee ballots, alleging Republican officials had
tampered with applications. Almost identical allegations later
surfaced in Martin County.
RECOUNTS RACED THE CLOCK
The hand recounts went down to the wire, with Broward and
Volusia counties making the 5 p.m. deadline on Nov. 26, but Palm
Beach missing it by 90 minutes. Miami-Dade had previously called
off its recount, saying it didn’t have enough time to complete it
before the deadline. After refusing to accept the tardy results,
Harris certified Bush the winner by 537 votes.
The Texas governor’s “victory” was short-lived. The next
day, Gore’s camp contested the results in three counties, asking
the Leon County Circuit Court in Tallahassee to order 14,000
disputed ballots cast in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties to be
recounted by hand and to give Gore 51 votes that were erased when
Nassau County officials reverted to the Election Day totals when
confronted by an unexplained discrepancy that appeared during the
machine recount.
In a pair of surreal processions that some found reminiscent of
the slow-motion freeway chase of the O.J. Simpson trial, 1.1
million ballots cast in Miami-Dade and Palm Beach counties were
trucked to Leon County, with news helicopters and vehicles in hot
pursuit, so they would be available if hand recounts were
ordered.
As pretrial skirmishes occurred in Tallahassee, all eyes
shifted to Washington, D.C., where the U.S. Supreme Court stepped
into the presidential election dispute on Dec. 1. The nine
justices heard 90 minutes of arguments on Bush’s challenge to the
manual recounts, but three days later sidestepped the dispute by
sending the case back to the Florida Supreme Court for further
clarification.
Over the next two days, Florida Circuit Judge N. Sanders
Sauls presided over a trial in Tallahassee on Gore’s election
challenge, then ruled that the vice president’s lawyers had
failed to provide evidence that the manual recounts would alter
the results of the election. Gore’s lawyers immediately appealed
to the Florida Supreme Court.
COURT COMES THROUGH FOR GORE
The seven justices of the state’s highest court — all of
whom were appointed by Democratic governors — came through for
the vice president again, ruling 4-3 on Dec. 8 that the manual
recounts should begin immediately and adding 383 votes to Gore’s
total — votes that were uncovered in previous hand recounts but
not added to the state totals.
That same day, the Republican-dominated Florida state
Legislature opened a special session with the intention of
settling the dispute if the court’s couldn’t do so by Dec. 12,
the constitutional deadline for selection of states’ Electoral
College electors. The Legislature’s leaders said they would name
their own slate of 25 electors pledged to support Bush if the
legal challenges to the results weren’t settled by then — a move
that Democrats charged amounted to an attempt to circumvent the
will of the people.
Elation in the Gore camp over the victory in the state
Supreme Court was quickly extinguished on Saturday when the U.S.
Supreme Court issued an emergency stay halting the recounts and
agreed to hear Bush’s appeal of the state court’s ruling.
On Monday, for the second time, the court heard 90 minutes
of arguments on the key issue of state rights vs. federal
authority at stake in the case. This time, the justices were even
swifter, issuing their ruling only one day later.
MSNBC.com’s Mike Brunker, NBC’s Norah O’Donnell and Pete
Williams and The Associated Press contributed to this report.
=================================================================
Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh, YHVH, TZEVAOT
FROM THE DESK OF:
*Michael Spitzer* <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The Best Way To Destroy Enemies Is To Change Them To Friends
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