5,000-vote swing in favor of VP ! ! !

STOP! the presses! ! ! (I've always wanted to say that) this just in from Chadville::::::::::::::::::::::::

In the lawsuit Harry Jacobs filed Nov. 17, two GOP operatives are accused of altering about 4,700 absentee requests by adding voter-ID numbers, salvaging them after Elections Supervisor Sandy Goard declared them invalid. Most of the requests were from Republicans.

Jacobs is asking that those ballots be thrown out. If Nelson agrees, that would mean a 5,000-vote swing in favor of Vice President Al Gore, enough to give him the election.

. http://www.salon.com/politics/wire/2000/11/25/judge/index.html

Get a life will you!

The best man has won. Congratulations are due to Joseph Liberman on his reelection as senator from Conn.
Good thing he didn't quite his day job.

The Shrub who would be King

Blast, I missed the bloody US Supreme Court decision. Do you happen to know how they rendered an opinion prior to oral arguments?

If Katherine Harris is the decding factor in US politics, I'm headed for Haiti where there is some sembalance of fairness.

Shrub's Coup d' etat

As The Learned Alan Derschowitz stated "Bush has planned and begun a "polite" Coup d' etat" The Declaration of absoulute rule by a small group of people before the law has spoken.

I think Haiti may have a more stable Government that the US

This really isn't an appropriate forum to be discussing this but since it was brought up, here goes.

I've been following this case pretty closely and it's becoming increasing clear that the supposedly neutral county election board and GOP campaign workers we're in colusion. Not only was it unfair to allow GOP workers in to correct republican absentee ballot applications while discarding democratic ones, but it was a blatant disregard for florida law covering absentee ballot fraud. Because of past absentee ballot fraud, several years ago Florida laws were strengthened to help prevent these abuses. And here they are pulling the same ole sh*t that occured in the past. I hope they throw out all the votes in that county and give the people involved a big fat fine and maybe some jail time to boot.

Bush has bent every principle. . .

To read the rest of this article follow the link:

http://slate.msn.com/framegame/entries/00-12-01_94439.asp

______________________________ + {:} + ______________________

It's a good argument against the legitimacy of a Bush presidency, too. In Florida, Bush has bent every principle, fudged every distinction, pocketed every unfair advantage, and matched every hypocrisy.

>>> "Bush's surrogates mock Democrats for supposing that human inspectors, by studying an ambiguously marked ballot, can "divine the intent of the voter." The verb "divine" conveys two criticisms: that the manual counters are judging ballots in mysterious ways and that they're pretending to know the voter's thoughts as only God can. But Bush has no trouble trusting machines, whose judgments of ballots are even more mysterious. "As Americans have watched on television, they have seen for themselves that manual counting ... introduces human error and politics into the vote-counting process," he complained a week ago. Bush never explains why, if you shouldn't trust a process you can see, you should trust a process you can't see. Machines have their own documented rate of error?which exceeds the margin of difference between Bush and Gore even under ideal circumstances?and you're not small enough or fast enough to watch them sort each ballot. When a human inspector misreads a ballot, Republican and Democratic observers are on hand to catch it. When a machine misreads a ballot, nobody knows.

While chiding Gore for presuming to know each voter's intent, Bush does the same. Arguing before the Florida Supreme Court last week, Bush attorney Michael Carvin protested that Gore was claiming "the only way to discern voters' intent is through manual recounts. But we do know what the voters' intent is, at least presumptively, because we have certified returns from 67 counties" based on machine counts. In other words, if the machine failed to count your ballot, you didn't intend to vote. At a Bush campaign briefing three days ago, Bush lawyer Irv Terrell applied this theory to the 10,000 machine-rejected ballots in Miami-Dade County, calling them "nonvotes." "When[Democrats] say that these votes are votes, they're wrong,"Terrell scoffed. "They've been found to not be votes." When challenged to explain why these mechanical "findings" shouldn't be reviewed by human eyes, Terrell denied that anybody doubted the machines' accuracy. Humans can't read minds, but machines can.

If humans can't be trusted to review the work of machines, how do we know the machines are accurate? Bush's lawyers keep evading this dilemma. At the Florida Supreme Court, Carvin was asked what could be done if a voter punched her ballot as instructed, but the machine didn't record it. "We'd have to know whether ? the machine malfunctioned," he replied. "What you need to do ? is look at the ballot, pursuant to some objective criteria, and ? figure out whether [the voter] intended it. But as we know, and as the colloquy before indicates, that is a standardless and subjective inquiry." In short, since humans aren't fit to second-guess machines, nothing could be done. . . . . . ."

Re: Bush has bent every principle. . .

"Machines have their own documented rate of error?which exceeds the margin of difference between Bush and Gore even under ideal circumstances"

That is pure bull. Any error they might make, which is infinitely smaller than human error, is unbiased in that it will err equally to both parties, which is why a second and third machine recount confirmed the first. It is the HAND counts that are prone to error and inconsistent interpretation. Those are the same kinds of machines that used to read computer programs, input by punch cards. Even one wrong read is enough to break a computer program. Those machines are nearly perfect in their ability to read a properly punched card.

Re: Bush has bent every principle. . .

~ + ~ + ~ Attention editor, DR1:

It's not my intention to disregard the guide lines and editorial policy of the "DR1
Forum". I think that the unresolved issues our presidential election (USA) are of
more than a passing interest for a goodly number correspondents to the forum. I
feel that the interests of the Dominican Republic and Dominican nationals will be very
much effected (possible) by the outcome of this election. Travel and immigration
polices will be treated differently by a change in administrations. Also a Cuba, sans
Castro, and how the USA interacts will directly effect tourism in the DR. ~ + ~ + ~

Jim, it's, shall we say, ironic that in our Hi Tech. society the minutiae of hanging chad
will/ may, in part, be the deciding factor in naming the leader of the free world.

In the news coverage that I've seen, the issue is this: if a voter punch card is spoiled,
should we simply through away that good faith attempt at casting a vote? ? ? The
hand counting of such punch cards is called for (by Florida state statute) when and if
there is a question as to the condition of said card. A counting machine ~ CAN NOT
~ determine the condition of the card. At any rate we still haven't heard from the US
Supreme Court.

Regards,

. . . CES

ps . . . possibly one or two of the following issues hold the trump card in deciding
the election:

Bush's little helpers

Ballot cooking

GOP intimidation

Rent - a - riot

Felons voted

Go on over to the Bravenet Forum for more . . . . . .

"If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency-room

care, we're going to have gag orders."

"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to

know it."

"It's one thing about insurance, that's a Washington term."

"I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a

gun"

Re: Gore has bent every principle. . .no DR issues

"In the news coverage that I've seen, the issue is this: if a voter punch card is spoiled, should we simply through away that good faith attempt at casting a vote?"

If that's what you think, then you haven't been paying very good attention.

"Jim, it's, shall we say, ironic that in our Hi Tech. society the minutiae of hanging chad will/ may, in part, be the deciding factor in naming the leader of the free world."

Again, you missed the boat by so far that further discussion is mute. Go back and read the reports. Try CNN.com, which even though is biased to Gore, presents both sides reasonably fairly.

I haven't read anything significant that relates the Dominican Republic to this election.

re: punch cards to jim

You obviously haven't been paying to much attention to the details Jim. The mandated machine recount cut Bush's lead in half and most of the changes occured in the counties that used the now famous punch card system. Did you listen the testimony this weekend? Even the punch card machine developer said a hand inspection of the ballots is the only way to be sure in a close election and they don't get much closer than this. And did you see all the instructions a person must follow in order to cast such a ballot?

A "Hypothetical" Question. . . (Jim)

Question:

What happens next year if the 'Shrub' takes the White House and the >complete and accurate< recount of Florida's "Chad-o-rama" clearly gives Gore the election? ? ?

The article below is quoted from "Salon.com" and I think it has an insight on the "Banana Republican's" campaign to * TAKE BACK * the White House they so deservedly lost.

Regards,

. . . CES

_________________________________ + {:} + _________________________

~ ~ ~ A Role Model for Bipartisanship? ~ ~ ~

Bush attorney Ted Olson is the link between impeachment and the Florida mess; Bush had better hope Gore backers don't mimic Olson's scorched-earth crusade against the sitting president.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

By Joe Conason

Pundits and politicians of the right will mount an emotional flag - waving campaign to confer "legitimacy" on a candidate who lost the popular vote. And they will pretend to believe that our traditions demand allegiance to the president-elect, regardless of how he wangled the job. . . .

(!)}}} Bill Clinton won two presidential elections without dispute, piling up large voter pluralities and electoral landslides.{{{(!) Yet his mandate was disdained virtually from the day he took office by Republicans and conservatives who saw his election as a fluke and viewed him as a usurper. . . .

Indeed, Olson went considerably beyond ordinary lawyering and lobbying in his anti-Clinton activism. Less than a year after Clinton's inauguration, the movement to depose him started to take shape . . . .

Using a pen name, Olson himself wrote several essays for the Spectator attacking Clinton as a Mafia-style gangster. The first of those rather vicious pieces appeared in February 1994, alleging a wide variety of criminal offenses by Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Bernard Nussbaum, Webster Hubbell and Betsey Wright. (Only Hubbell was ever convicted of any crime, though even he wasn't charged of any of the felonies suggested in Olson's pseudonymous prosecution memo.) . . . .

Although the furious exertions of Olson and his comrades fell short of their ultimate goal, they did terrible damage to the Clintons and the country. What remains is the scorched political landscape of the Clinton era, an inhospitable terrain for bipartisanship and a hard place to cultivate acceptance of a new president who may or may not have won one of the closest elections in American history. . . .

But for now, at least, he stands as a symbol of stubborn resistance to a duly elected president whose "legitimacy" Olson and his friends never accepted at all. His client, the would-be president elect, must hope none of Gore's backers decide to mimic Olson and his GOP elves. . . .

_________________________ ~ ? ? ? ~ _________________

Re: Shrub's Coup...or "I want my Election, NOW!"

To see the complete article go to "Slate.com".

Read the Shrub's words and see if you can under stand his disjointed logic. . .

. . . CES

____________________________________ . + {:} + . _________________________________

}}} Take It Like a Mandate {{{

By William Saletan

Thursday, Dec. 7, 2000

If, in the next few days, Al Gore gives up his fight to recount additional votes in Florida, here is what George W. Bush will have won. He will have won Florida by fewer than 1,000 votes. With that 0.015 percent margin, he will collect the 25 electoral votes accorded to Florida's 6 million voters. With those 25 electoral votes, he will win the Electoral College by four votes out of 538. Meanwhile, he will have lost the national popular vote by 330,000 votes. He will not have won a voters. With those 25 electoral votes, he will win the Electora College by four votes out of 538. Meanwhile, he will have lost the national popular vote by 330,000 votes. He will not have won a majority of citizens, registered voters, or actual voters. He will not even have won a plurality of actual voters. His party, having lost seats in both houses Congress, will be reduced to parity in the Senate. How, then, will Bush persuade Congress to pass his agenda? The same way he won the election and the recount: by spinning the illusion of overwhelming support.

. . . Bush says Democrats should support his tax cut because the economy is in trouble. "There are some warning signs on the horizon about the economy," he asserted on CBS Tuesday. "One of the reasons I fought so strongly for tax relief was to serve as an insurance policy against a economic downturn. I think the evidence makes my tax plan even more compelling." Thirty seconds later, Bush argued the opposite: "The reason I sit here, the reason I was able to run the race I ran against a sitting vice president?with what had been and now hopefully will be a good economy, and the world basically at peace?is because of the ideas that I talked about, including a tax relief plan."

To recap: If the economy is fragile, Congress should pass Bush's tax cut. If the economy is strong, Bush could not have won without a mandate for his tax cut. The economy is either fragile or strong. Therefore, Congress should pass Bush's tax cut.

. . . More people intended to vote for Bush than for Gore. Having ridiculed the unfalsifiable Democratic claim that more people in Florida intended to vote for Gore than for Bush, Republicans turn around and claim that more people throughout country intended to vote for Bush than for Gore. "Had the networks not called Florida early that night, [Gore] wouldn't have won the popular vote ? and I think Bush would be above 300 electoral votes," Newt Gingrich asserted Tuesday. Imagine what "would have happened in Florida had some of the networks not called it for Gore," agreed Jack Kemp. "Imagine what happened in California and a lot of other states. I think the popular vote was too close to call.

"To recap: A candidate who wins the popular vote or the Electoral College has a mandate. If hypothetical votes don't count, Bush won Florida and therefore the Electoral College. If hypothetical votes count, Bush won the popular vote. Therefore, Bush has mandate. Bush thinks he won a mandate because if he intended to win your vote, he could have. In the latter case, you're supposed to accept two levels of mind-reading: revisionist account of his own strategy, and his intuition that if he had changed strategies, more non-voters would have cast ballots for him. Talk about divining the intent of the voter.

http://slate.msn.com/framegame/entries/00-12-07_94796.asp