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Potomac Crossings
--By George Mason
Gore's Pain
Updated through December 6th,2000
Fast and Furious. The reporting and analysis pace is so accelerated in the Bush-Gore battle that weekly magazines are out of the loop and daily newspapers are out-of-date by the time they hit the streets. Cable TV and the Internet are dominating the dissemination of views, news and propaganda. Inside Washington will adopt a short item format until the presidential issues are resolved. That will allow us to update as often as necessary.
The Source of Al Gore’s Pain. The most overlooked human element of this 30 days is the probability that the Democrat get-out-the-vote campaign did succeed in getting Gore campaign voters to the polls. However, the Democrat on-the-ground troops in Duval and Palm Beach counties gave mistaken voter instructions to the people they ferried to the polls. It is likely that the erroneous voter instructions of his own workers to the people they rounded up is what cost Gore the legal vote in Florida.
The Dems Death Rattle. Discouraged by the legal chances of getting more votes through the State Supreme Court, the Gore campaign has shifted its emphasis to support of the two absentee ballot cases which hold the possibility of discarding Bush votes instead. The Miami Herald financed a statistical study that purported to show that if all ballots had been counted Gore would win by more than 20,000 votes. The study, however, was proven to be distorted because the author included double punched (over-vote) ballots. Over-votes are not counted anywhere since no one can declare which vote was the correct one. Absent the over-votes, the study showed a tie unless dimpled ballots are counted everywhere. Gore has to have dimples to win in any statistical analysis.
Federal 11th Circuit Acts. The federal court denied the Bush campaign an injunction to stop recounts in Florida on the grounds that no damage had yet been done since Bush won the recount. However, the court reserved the right to revisit the Federal issues in the event damage occurs. The Bush campaign can revive the issue should the Florida State Supreme Court overturn the election with a recount favoring Gore.
Seminole and Martin County Trials Begin. The two trials alleging that local election officials allowing Republicans to attach voter ID numbers to absentee ballot applications should result in disallowing all or some statistically significant portion of absentee votes got underway Wednesday and are expected to wrap up Thursday. Either party may appeal the decisions to the State Supreme Court and a Florida state ruling on this issue is not eligible for appeal to the Federal Supreme Court.
Florida Legislature Special Session Begins Friday. The state legislature declared a special session to begin Friday and be available to designate a slate of electors on the 13th in order to preserve the state’s 25 electors in the vote on December 18th. Their action would be appealed to the Federal Supreme Court and allow a path to reach beyond a final action resting with the State Supreme Court. The issue, if it goes that far, will be whether the final arbiter of the election will be the Lawton Chiles appointed-judges of Florida, the elected representatives of the state which have the US Constitutional right or the US Supreme Court.
US Supremes Bunt, Bush Advances a Base. In a surprise move at noon on Monday, the United States Supreme Court unanimously remanded the decision of the Florida Supreme Court and re-instated the status quo as of November 14th. Their move is an interim step, not a final decision. The Federal Court has endorsed the central principle of the Bush position, says the Wall Street Journal that state legislatures, not state courts, are paramount in making decisions about the selection of presidential electors. They have invited the state court to recast their ruling in accordance with the Federal principle.
Judge Sanders Sauls’ Court. To hold his restless troops, vice-president Gore desperately needs "votes." He has lost on the election, lost on the automatic recount, lost on the partial hand recount in Gore-favorable counties under Gore-favorable rules ordered by a friendly state supreme court. Late afternoon Monday, the ruling of Judge N. Saunders Sauls who delivered a sweeping ruling grounded in both fact and law that favored the Bush campaign shattered these hopes.
Electoral College Reform. One suggestion for reform in the Electoral College is to adopt a proportional distribution of votes. A plan which would not require a Constitutional amendment is to (1) award two electoral votes (representing the state’s Senators) to the candidate who won the state and (2) award the remaining electoral votes to the winner of the popular vote in each Congressional District. John Hood has calculated what results such a proportional system would have produced this year. There would be a Bush victory 280-258.
Military Commands Warn Restive Personnel. One Air Force and one Army Command have issued warnings that
it is a crime to express contempt for the nation’s political leaders, said Thomas Ricks in the Washington Post.
The ban applies to speech of all kinds, including e-mail correspondence. The Air Force Combat Command and the Army’s
Training and Doctrine Command both sited UCMJ Article 88 stating that violations can result in dismissal and one
year’s imprisonment. The Navy and Marine Corps have not issued any such directives. Similar warnings had to be
issued twice during the Clinton era. For the Gore campaign to "win" through the Seminole and Martin county
cases, they have to advocate discarding correctly cast and accurately counted absentee ballots, primarily from
the military.
####
George Mason, 1725-92, was known as the Sage of Gunston Hall.
His Virginia declaration of rights, written in 1776, was the model for the first section of the Declaration of
Independence. A friend of Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, Mason was an original drafter of the Constitution
and the first ten amendments to the Bill of Rights. He refused, however, to sign the final version of the Constitution
because he thought it did too little for individuals and, without the Bill of Rights, gave too much power to the
government.This column honors his memory.
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