Wednesday, November 29, 2000 -- NEW YORK (AmpolNS) -- One of the serendipitous results of the election fiasco in Florida was that our email box has been swamped with submissions, letters and comments -- so many that it is very difficult to choose which to publish.

We want to thank all of our readers -- on both sides of the political aisle -- for the many submissions we have received, and wanted to share a few of their comments and insights with our email subscribers and web readers.

From: Monica in California
Re: Coincidences?

Coincidences? You decide

1. Is it a coincidence that the only state in which this election crisis happened is the one governed by Bush's brother?

2. Is it a coincidence that the exit polls called the election correctly everywhere in the country -- except for Florida?

3. Is it a coincidence that shortly after Florida was called for Gore, Bush made an urgent call to his brother the governor, and shortly thereafter the call for Gore was recalled by all networks?

4. Is it a coincidence that soon thereafter the election was incorrectly called for Bush by his own cousin at Fox (creating the lasting myth that Bush won)?

5. Is it a coincidence that all pre-election polls had Gore leading in Florida the night of Nov. 6 -- a lead that mysteriously evaporated by next day?

6. Is it a coincidence that the votes lost by Gore in various "irregularities" in Florida could well account for just that missing lead?

7. Is it a coincidence that pre-election polls (e.g. Zogby/Reuters) correctly called all states except for Florida?

8. Is it a coincidence that conservative counties used high-accuracy Optical Scan systems while heavily Democratic counties used antiquated punch-cards?

9. Is it a coincidence that the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board decided to abruptly stop the hand count after mobs of Republicans paid for by Bush and other GOP campaigns stormed their building?

10. Is it a coincidence that prior to certifying the election, the Florida Secretary of State chose to toss out hand-counts in Democratic counties (Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Nassau) but accepted 418 hand-counted votes for Bush from heavily Republican counties (Franklin, Hamilton, Taylor, Washington, Lafayette and Seminole)?

11. Is it a coincidence that the aforementioned Secretary of State is a Bush family friend, delegate, and campaign activist?

12. Is it a coincidence that with her deciding which votes count and which do not, Bush managed to hold onto just enough of a lead for her to certify the election?

13. Is it a coincidence that the official willing to sign legislation to appoint a Republican slate of electors and overrule the will of the people is  Bush's brother?

14. Is it a coincidence that prior to the election -- when Bush was leading in the polls -- the national "liberal" media was awash in stories of a possible popular-electoral vote split, but largely ignored this historic occurrence after Gore, not Bush, won the popular vote?

15. And is it a coincidence that the anointed Republican standard-bearer, a candidate not fit to be dog catcher, just happens to be the son of a former President and head of the CIA?

From: Robert Litz
Re: By the Numbers

BY THE NUMBERS

Quick! What’s your nine digit voter ID number?

No doubt, somewhere in America, there are obsessive-compulsive political junkies who do, in fact, know. Some may have needlepointed it onto a pillow. I’m even willing to concede that somewhere out there is an outlandishly eccentric citizen who’s spelled it out in blinking Christmas lights and strung it across the façade of his double-wide. 

When I lived in New York, I used to keep my voter registration card in a plastic baggie tucked safely into a dog-eared copy of the Constitution, snuggled up to the Bill of Rights. Every biennial election I’d pull it out and present it to the party-hack gatekeeper at my Lower East Side polling place. Surely this qualifies me for some electoral cult which, if I had a mind to, I could locate somewhere on the Net. 

But did I know that number by heart? Not a chance. I can barely manage my phone, fax, primary pin, and social security numbers. 

We are awash in numbers: email passwords, credit cards, insurance policies, the phone/faxes of family and friends and business associates, birthdays, mortgages, product IDs for those guaranteed-to-break-down appliances and home office gizmos that self-destruct just after you’ve lost the registration or passed the warranty cut-off date, whichever comes first.

So I feel for the Floridians who failed to accurately enter voter ID numbers on their absentee ballot applications. 

As creepy as it is that the election boss of Seminole County allowed GOP volunteers to set up shop to correct the applications, I sympathize. Given the recent history of voter fraud in Florida involving absentee ballots, I understand why the Florida legislature added this safeguard. But really. Expecting some globe-trotting or not-quite-ex-pat soul to have his or her voter ID at his/her fingertips is expecting much too much.

In a presidential race in which every vote really could make the difference, partisans will challenge any and all remotely questionable ballots that could go to the other side. I’d be disappointed if they didn’t. After all, if the advocacy system is the way our justice system is supposedly kept fair, why shouldn’t the same principle apply to the counting of votes? Even so, the Democratic challenge to Seminole County’s absentee ballots, while fully justified, rings false given the Democrats’ civic-minded plea for a fair, full count. Had Seminole’s Democratic ground troops expected the absentees to go for Prince Albert, I’m willing to bet they would have been there, right alongside their GOP rivals eagerly penning in ID numbers. 

In the interest of common sense, the Democrats’ Seminole county suit should be dropped at once. Common sense should prevail in other disputes as well. Chads sufficiently dimpled to discern voter intent, stylus pricks that came close to the perforation holes in misaligned cards, and absentee ballots from military personnel that lack postmarks should all be counted. No one can reasonably expect perfection but we do expect that best-efforts will be made to count all our votes. 

Rules, however, matter. All double-punched, mixed dimpled-punched cards, or absentees with mismatched signatures should be cast aside quicker than last week’s talking points. All challenges permitted by law should be honored and celebrated by the citizenry, especially those legal challenges that are driven by a desire for greater fairness, accuracy, and completeness. Any legal action intended to block a full and accurate count should provoke the ire of all citizens. A fair and accurate count, guided by law, tempered by common sense, is the least we should expect in a tight election. This expectation is part of the collective compact we as a people renew each time we hold a general election. Do this and legitimacy necessarily follows.

Our current post-election drama is simply a crisis of numbers. It becomes a crisis of democracy only if the number problems eclipse the greater goal of a full and fair election. Getting annoyed with a cumbersome process is like blaming a dull saw for taking too long to cut the wood. The answer isn’t to stop sawing and live with a mangled, half-severed beam as Team Bush would have us do, but to muscle on (or get a better blade).

Our problem is that the election results fall within the margin of error of our accounting methods. The technicians, among them the inventor of the Votematic machine itself, are unanimous in their judgment that punch-card optical readers aren’t sufficiently reliable when the margin separating two candidates is this close. By hallowed tradition, instinctive deference to the human over the mechanical, and by near-universal statute, hand-counting of ballots in a tight race is a given. Even in Texas.

Team Gore’s perfectly legitimate contest of the most recent Florida certification relies on a plain reading of Florida statute 102.168 Section 3 (c) which states that any candidate can contest election results if “Receipt of a number of illegal votes or rejection of a number of legal votes (is) sufficient to change or place in doubt the result of the election.” (my emphasis) Big Al’s lawyers invite us to look at the numbers: 

In Palm Beach County, Gore gained 215 votes after a manual recount; these 215 votes were rejected by the Florida Secretary of State.

In Miami-Dade, after approximately twenty percent of the votes were manually recounted, Gore gained about 160 votes; these too were rejected. In Nassau County, a decision by the local canvassing board to reject the recount tally and submit instead the initial November 7th count took some 50 votes away from Gore.

Some quick, very un-fuzzy math narrows the margin by which Bush leads in Florida to 112 votes. Talk about a margin of error!

Excluding the flap over absentee and butterfly ballots, if you add the 10,000-plus ballots in Miami-Dade that the machines rejected for showing no vote for president and 4,000 ballots in Palm Beach that show sufficient “dimple” to be able to discern voter intent, we’re talking about a situation that clearly falls within the rules laid out by Florida statute 102.168 (3c). If, as even Bush’s supporters concede, a big portion of those 14,000 ballots belong to Al Gore, then asking Gore to shut up and go away is downright silly.

If you do the math, it sure looks like Al Gore is the president-elect. And no amount of patriot-bashing, elitist whining, provocative slander, bullying from white supremacists, loud harrumphing from Poppy Bush’s pals, petulance from the punditocracy, and presumptive claims from Team Bush can change that. As we speak, the refs in their black robes are looking at the instant replay tapes and if you listen closely, you can hear the fat lady warming up her pipes in the green room. 

My advice to George W. – bag the transition posturing and start looking for a new ball club to front for. My advice to Al – start writing your inaugural and this time, please remember that most of us aren’t fourth graders and can do without your Mr. Rogers’ platitudes and attitude.

From: A prominent Texas attorney [name withheld]
Re: James Baker

I have litigated against some of the new James Baker team and thought I would give you a little information.

Baker and Botts is Jim Baker's firm, based in Houston. I have tried many cases against them. They represent many of the rich and powerful, including the Liedtke brothers, who are as tight with the Bushes as tight gets. They were contributors to the group which pulled the bag job on the DNC headquarters at the Watergate in 1972. Maurice Stans laundered the money through Mexico.

Baker and Botts once refused to produce documents in a big case I had with them, avoiding production for over 18 months. When they were finally ordered to produce, they delivered 500,000 pages, with no order to them, using 10th generation copies, and it was clear they had sanitized the files. Ultimately, we prevailed against them, but not until we had tried many cases in state and federal courts.

Daryl Bristow is a well known Houston business defense attorney against whom I have also litigated. He engages in the same type of tactics. 

They are there to do one thing: slow down the process to assure that no meaningful progress is made.

The new Bush tactic is to slow the court proceedings and rely upon the Florida Legislature as their fail safe mechanism. They know the ultimate arbiter is the US House, which stands ready to do whatever it takes to name Bush, irrespective of the actions by Florida Courts.

No matter what happens in the courts, they intend to install Bush.

Bush has signaled a new era in brownshirt tactics which harkens back to the post 1954 Brown v. The Board of Education south:

Ignore the courts and act as if their edicts do not matter.

From: Gary Abraham
Re: "...move on"?

I do not like the unenviable seat I have been put in of defending Gore. He was not my candidate of choice, but I've seen and heard things that have troubled me -- seen supposedly rational people look at an election that only a fool or a liar would call honest, and say "move on".

It stinks of mob mentality when we take the point of least resistance and least reason, and say about things that are wrong, "hide them", and men that are right, "silence them".

"...move on..."  This is not a game, as much as people would like to treat it as such, and not a joke, as much as people would like to make it as such.  Something dreadfully wrong happened in Florida, something that seems even to the most insensitive like culpability. Polls closed early,
people turned out of line, streets blocked, absentee ballots with no post mark, ballots pre-punched or over-punched, all in one state, under one governor named Bush, who guaranteed his other brother Bush that he would win Florida by any means necessary.

"...move on..."  How? Where? Where do you move on from that? If true then it means men conspired to steal the presidency, and silence the people. If true it means our democracy has been raped, our liberties despoiled, and our very concept of government of the people by the people and for the people, shattered by a few people.

"...move on..."  History will judge us by how clearly we see these present days, how nobly or how spitefully we act. History will judge this as the moment when we as a nation stood up for our rights, or we as a nation backed down from them. This is not about democrat and republican, us or them, it is in the last final sense about just us. About in some real sense America, and how far we are willing to go to compromise her, and how far we are willing to go to save her.

"...move on..."  Above all else a man, a President, or a Presidential candidate must have the strength of his convictions. To be able to see a wrong and right it. Now to ask a man to back away from a wrong because... what? We don't want to look at it? don't want to believe it? don't want to acknowledge it? I have more respect for Gore now then I did when this campaign started. He has proven himself a man of sterner stuff, to take a fight to the wall and if necessary beyond. All I have ever asked of a candidate is that they be honorable men and have the strength of their convictions. Bush has proven himself something far from that, and it gives me no joy to say that, and no comfort. It means that there is serious room for concern and question here, and I think there is something wrong with the idea of tossing up our hands and just giving the presidency to Bush because he cries the loudest for deadlines, and we don't feel like finishing the count.

"...move on..." Some people are tired of being reminded that Bush might have broken the law in Florida, tired of being reminded that people didn't get the right to vote, tired of being reminded that the man they voted for, might not have been the right man, tired of the burden of democracy.

"...move on..." Not that simple. Not that easy. I won't let it be that easy. Democracy, sometimes -- like freedom, like liberty, like peace -- is a weighty ideal to bear. It takes constant vigilance and constant sacrifice. And when the very concept of a free election has been called into question, I do not think -- compared to the sacrifice of countless millions to build and sustain this democracy -- that two days or two weeks or two years is to much a sacrifice to make to ensure the quality of that democracy.

"...move on..." To what? To what should we move on? This moment defines our Democracy, our nation for years to come, and how well or badly it's handled will determine the type of Americans we have become. The type of people. We will either meanly lose, or nobly save our last... best chance, for peace.