Gore Team Flagged for Cheating

The Supreme Court was, it seems, horrified that the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount of only the "undervotes" without establishing any set of standards as to just how they would be counted. The Court wrote: "When a court orders a statewide remedy, there must be at least some assurance that the rudimentary requirements of equal treatment and fundamental fairness are satisfied."

"The recount mechanisms implemented in response to the decisions of the Florida Supreme Court do not satisfy the minimum requirement for non-arbitrary treatment of voters necessary to secure the fundamental right [to vote]."

Simply stated, the Florida Supreme Court wasted so much time with its unconstitutional meandering that there is no longer any time to conduct a proper recount of the Florida ballots before the "safe harbor" date of Dec. 12, which – for those of you who went to government schools – was yesterday.

The Supreme Court is going to be strongly criticized for remanding this case to the Florida Supreme Court without providing any way to formulate another remedy. In essence, the U.S. Supreme Court told the Florida Supreme Court that it could give it another shot – order a recount, set some proper standards, and provide for judicial review of contested ballots – if it could get the job done in, say, two hours.

But how about the Gore campaign? If they had gone ahead and allowed Secretary of State Katherine Harris to certify the Florida vote on Nov. 14, as the law provides, and

The election in Florida was close. Closer than anyone would ever dare to predict. We’ll probably never see something like this again. There were ballots that did not register a vote for president, and there were ballots that registered a vote for more than one presidential candidate. These ballots were not included in the final totals, and these ballots could have changed the outcome.

Contest the election? Sure! Ask for a manual recount? Sure! But here’s where the Democrats screwed up. Instead of trying to count all of the votes based on the standards then in place in Florida, or on some set of standards that both sides could agree to prior to the recount, the Democrats insisted on implementing recount standards designed to give an edge to Al Gore.

The standards differed from county to county, and, as the Supreme Court noted in its decision, from table to table in the recount room. Clearly the Democrats should have known that this was not going to pass constitutional muster, unless their arrogance was so great that they thought they could sneak this one through, too.

The Democrats wanted votes to be counted for Gore, dimpled and pregnant chads, that had never been counted for any candidate in any election in the history of Florida elections. In short, the Democrats – and this includes the Democrats on the Florida Supreme Court – overreached. They didn’t seek a fair and equitable recount; they sought and implemented a recount using standards that would favor their candidate and standards that were, as it turns out (and as they likely knew) unconstitutional.

In the final analysis the Democrats ran out the clock pushing for a recount using unconstitutional standards favorable to their candidate. They have nobody to blame but themselves.

Just what recount standards did the Gore team want?

Bottom line, the Gore team did not want any set of standards to apply to the counting of the so-called undervotes. In oral arguments before the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore attorney David Bois said that the standards as to what should and should not count as a vote for Gore should vary "from individual to individual." Every individual involved in the recount process should be able to make up his or her own mind as to what constituted a vote for Gore.

They wanted loose recount standards because they couldn’t possibly win any other way. Once the legal votes were counted, the Gore team knew they had lost. They knew that the only way they could steal the election would be to change illegal ballots into legal ballots for Gore. They had no other avenue open to them.

This morning I listened to Charlie Gibson, Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric and the like talk about the "deep division" in the U.S. Supreme Court. And when the media isn't using the "division" word it's using the "political" word, saying that the decision was political. The media aren't going to get the liberal Gore presidency that they wanted so badly. It's going to be a Republican presidency, and this is a bitter pill for them to swallow.

The game plan? Discredit the Supreme Court and, thus, the Bush presidency. Naw, surely the media wouldn't do that – would they?

Democrats will be saying that votes weren’t counted. What they mean to say is that not enough votes were created.

Democrats will be screaming that "every vote should be counted," etc. Here’s a little part of yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling that applies to this particular Democratic talking point. The Court said that Florida law "cannot reasonably be thought to require the counting of improperly marked ballots." In short, an improperly marked ballot is not a legal vote, and only legal votes should be counted.

I guess we’ll be hearing a lot of this "Well, Gore won the popular vote" nonsense. Well, we’ve said it before, the popular vote has absolutely no constitutional significance whatsoever. None. It’s like trying to determine the winner of a seven-game World Series contest by the total runs scored over seven games rather than the number of games won. The candidates didn’t campaign for the popular vote, and the popular vote means nothing. It’s just the plaintive cry of the Sore Loserman campaign.