Don't Count On Me
I've been seeing promos for HBO's Recount, the story of the Florida aftermath (with all that after-math) in the 2000 election. The script has been floating around town for a while, though I haven't had a chance to read it. Still, sounds like fun.
Alas, the story is already outdated. See, back then, Democrats knew to overturn the results, they'd have to count votes that had never been counted before--even if it meant changing the rules--so the refrain was let's count all the votes.
But now when it comes to Florida, the new rule is let's not count any of the votes. Oh well, whatever works.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:33 AM
3 Comments:
Thats an oddly partisan take on the mess that was the Florida recount.
It may sound partisan, but what's wrong with it? There was a count, a recount and another recount, and every time the dust settled, Bush won, so it was at all times up to the Democrats to move forward if they wanted to overturn the results. The consortium of newspaper that researched the vote for months afterwards concluded that by any conventional means of counting, Bush won. The only reason Gore had any chance of winning is because rather than letting things go as they usually did, he decided to take the case to court and hope the Supreme Court of Florida would changes things. That they did, and in an after-the-fact manner knowing it could determine the electino of a president. They overturned 1) legislature-mandated deadlines (state and national), 2) required executive decisions 3) lower court decisions all along the line 4) their own previous decisions on the same case (to keep things going) and, overall, countenanced new types of counting votes that had never before been used in the state of Florida and had, in fact, been explicitly rejected in previous legal cases when the vote was closer.
(Just in the interest of completeness....)And in response, the US Supreme Court ignored all previous precedent on federalism in voting rights cases and issued a decision that they tried to assert would have no precedential value because it was ever so unique a circumstance. Thus proving that tough facts make for particularly bad law, at all levels of courts.
Post a Comment
<< Home