[Rhodes22-list] Political - NOT RELATED TO SAILING!!!

[brad haslett]

Stan,

If you're not to busy giving your molds away to the
Chinese, here's some good reading on the subject of
election recounts. 

Brad

________________________________________________


February 21, 2005
The Political Cost of Selective Recounts
By Michael Barone 

Sometimes a decision made in the heat of partisan
battle has reverberations for years to come.

One such decision was the one of Al Gore's campaign to
selectively challenge the results of the 2000 election
in Florida by demanding hand counts of votes cast in
three counties -- Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach.
The latter two produce huge majorities for Democratic
candidates, and the election officials in charge of
the hand counts were Democrats. In other words, Gore
sought new counts only in areas where he was likely to
gain votes and would not take the risk of a statewide
hand count, where those gains might be offset by
others for George W. Bush.

We know now that, thanks to the news media consortium
that recounted ballots in every Florida county,
recounting under any method and any criterion they
tested would not have overturned Bush's exceedingly
thin plurality.

But the Gore campaign, Terry McAuliffe during his four
years as Democratic National Chairman and John Kerry
in his 2004 presidential campaign encouraged
rank-and-file Democrats to believe that the election
was stolen. They decided to delegitimize an American
election for partisan gain. And in the process, they
did much damage to George W. Bush and the Republicans,
to the reputation of the American political process
and, inadvertently but to a far greater extent, to
their own Democratic Party.

The damage to Bush was obvious. A large minority of
Americans has regarded him as an illegitimate
president. That has weakened his ability to work
across party lines and has helped to maintain the
intense polarization of the electorate. It made it
more difficult for him to win re-election in 2004.

The damage to the Democrats, I would argue, has been
greater. Many of them remained focused during the
first Bush term on the Florida controversy, and have
done less than they might have to produce attractive
new policies. McAuliffe predicted that anger over the
Florida result would defeat Gov. Jeb Bush in 2002. But
Bush won with 56 percent of the vote. 

Democrats hoped that anger over Florida would produce
a huge turnout in 2004. John Kerry did win 16 percent
more popular votes than Al Gore. But George W. Bush
won 23 percent more popular votes than he did in 2000.

What might have hurt the Democrats even more, perhaps,
is if Gore's strategy had been successful and he had
been installed as president, thanks to the partial
hand count sanctioned by the six-to-one
Democratic-appointed Florida Supreme Court.

We now have a test case of that in the state of
Washington. There, the 2004 election for governor was
exceedingly close. Something like half the ballots in
Washington are cast by mail, and it takes a long time
to count them. On Nov. 10, the count showed Republican
Dino Rossi up by 3,492 votes. Two days later,
Democrats in heavily Democratic King County, which
casts about one-third of the state's votes, started
turning in affidavits to qualify provisional votes --
something which hadn't been done in more Republican
counties. Then, the King County auditor's office
starting finding new ballots that had been misplaced
-- 10,000 on Nov. 16, 1,779 on various days between
Nov. 23 and Dec 18.

A recount on Nov. 24 showed Rossi still ahead of
Democrat Christine Gregoire by 42 votes. But Democrats
on Dec. 3 demanded a hand count, which gave Gregoire a
lead of 129 votes on Dec. 23.

Gregoire has been inaugurated as governor. But an
examination of King County records shows about 1,800
more ballots cast than names of voters who asked for
them. Republicans have brought a lawsuit asking that
the election result be set aside and a new election
held.

By a 53 percent to 36 percent margin, voters believed
that Rossi had really won, and by a 51 percent to 43
percent margin, they favored Rossi in a revote. A
Survey USA poll showed 62 percent favoring a revote.

A selective recount, of the sort Gore sought in
Florida, has made Gregoire governor, at least
temporarily. But it has cast a pall of illegitimacy
over her far greater than that cast over George W.
Bush by the Florida result.

Of course, no two cases are exactly alike. But now we
have a better idea of what a Gore presidency secured
by a selective recount would have been like. The
negative reverberations from Gore's decision to seek a
selective recount would have been even greater than
they were. It's unfortunate that he didn't seek a
statewide recount or that he didn't follow Richard
Nixon's example and decline to contest a close
election.



--- stan <stan at rhodes22.com> wrote:

> Herb,
> 
> We do agree on some things.  George won it fair and
> square.  Nader stole it 
> by a mile.
> 
> stan/ec
> 
> ----- Original Message ----- 
> From: "Herb Parsons" <hparsonsys at parsonsys.com>
> To: "The Rhodes 22 mail list"
> <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>; "'stan'" 
> <stan at rhodes22.com>; "'The Rhodes 22 mail list'" 
> <rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org>
> Sent: Friday, February 18, 2005 5:30 PM
> Subject: RE: [Rhodes22-list] Political - NOT RELATED
> TO SAILING!!!
> 
> 
> > There's a simple anwer to that. He didn't have a
> "stolen first term".
> >
> > 
> 
> __________________________________________________
> Use Rhodes22-list at rhodes22.org, Help?
> www.rhodes22.org/list
> 



		
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