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FLORIDA
FOLLIES
Right now, things look pretty chaotic in Florida. Not only is the presidential election result on hold, but the state is inundated with court cases and lawyers. Despite the GOPsters avowal that it does not have enough attorneys to simultaneously meet all of the DEMsters challenges to the ballot count, this is seen as just another delaying tactic. They have tons of lawyers on the payroll.
At this writing, there is the case of the "butterfly ballot" in the Florida Supreme Court. In Atlanta, the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is looking at a Bush move to disqualify manual recounts. The N.A.A.C.P. is suing Florida for defranchising many black voters. A Tallahassee judge is hearing a Gore request to count the "undercounts" in several areas. The U.S. Supremes, and the Florida legislature are poised to throw monkey wrenches everywhere.
However, the one to watch is a huge suppurating boil on the ass of the GOPsters in Seminole County. Here a suit is being heard by Judge Nikki Clark that seeks to throw out all 15,000 absentee ballots. This is because an election official allowed Republican workers to correct incomplete absentee ballot applications from Republican voters (that had previously been rejected) by writing in their missing voter registration numbers.
And, in Martin County, it's alleged that GOPsters actually removed absentee ballot applications from the election board office, wrote in the missing voter registration numbers, and then returned the documents. In both these cases, if fraud or irregularity is proven, ALL THE ABSENTEE BALLOTS FROM THESE COUNTIES WOULD BE TOSSED. Judge Terry Lewis is hearing this one.
Without these votes, which favored Bush by 2 to 1, Gore would win Florida by margin of more than 4,000 votes. It's now up to Judge Nikki Clark but there isn't much time left. This situation has spooked the Republican majority of the Florida Legislature to hold a special session to assure that all electoral votes go to Bush. Judge Clark is being demonized by Republicans in the same manner as they accused Democrats of demonizing Secretary of State Harris.
It's interesting that the media is urging Gore to give up, claiming that polls show most of us are willing to accept Bush. At the same time it is declaring that polls show that viewers think the media favors Gore. Go figure. Whatever the outcome of this mess, we see time and time again that we have a government of the media, by the media and for the media.
While most of the talking heads are calling on Gore to realize that he has lost and should concede, Chris Matthews, of "Hardball," is a notable exception. He delineates two reasons why he thinks Gore will or should prevail. He cites the above mentioned Seminole County suit for one and all those undercounted ballots that Gore is trying to get counted, for another.
Mathews warns that media reporters and others, under the Freedom of Information Act, will obtain those (uncounted by hand) ballots and there could be hell to pay if Bush is inaugurated and these ballots, once counted by the court officials, show that Gore really won.
At this writing, Palm Beach County officials have already allowed Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group, to examine thousands of disputed ballots on Tuesday, the 28th of November. There is a waiting line of reporters and academics asking to examine these ballots. This is one of the reasons that the Bush lawyers petitioned the Court to have ALL of these ballots brought to the courthouse.
Meanwhile, Jeb Bush, brother of "W" and his Republican legislature, stand poised to declare all of Florida's electoral votes for Bush. The fix is in no matter what the courts may decide. Ah, The Brotherhood trumps democracy every time. Do you wonder how this plays in Zimbabwe?
2000-049
Copyright
2000 Renee T. Louise and Ruth M. Sprague, Ph.D. These articles may be republished
for noncommercial use only, provided that they are copied intact, and that
this copyright notice is attached. Address all queries to: twanda@gendergappers.org.
G e n d e r G a p p e r s T M
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This is the latest incarnation of a popular article (author unknown, please step forward) that has been circulating the internet:
A Zimbabwe politician was quoted as saying that children should study this event closely for it shows that election fraud is not only a third world phenomena.
1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).
2. Imagine that the self-declared winner lost the popular vote but won based on some old colonial holdover (electoral college) from the nation's pre-democracy past.
3. Imagine that the self-declared winner's 'victory' turned on disputed votes cast in a province governed by his brother!
4. Imagine that the poorly drafted ballots of one district, a district heavily favoring the self-declared winner's opponent, led thousands of voters to vote for the wrong candidate.
5. Imagine that members of that nation's most despised caste, fearing for their lives/livelihoods, turned out in record numbers to vote in near-universal opposition to the self-declared winner's candidacy.
6. Imagine that hundreds of members of that most-despised caste were intercepted on their way to the polls by state police operating under the authority of the self-declared winner's brother.
7. Imagine that six million people voted in the disputed province and that the self-declared winner's "lead" was only 327 votes. Fewer, certainly, than the vote counting machines' margin of error.
8. Imagine that the self-declared winner and his political party opposed a more careful by-hand inspection and re-counting of the ballots in the disputed province or in its most hotly disputed district.
9. Imagine that the self-declared winner, himself a governor of a major province, had the worst human rights record of any province in his nation and actually led the nation in executions.
10. Imagine that a major campaign promise of the self-declared winner was to appoint like-minded human rights violators to lifetime positions on the high court of that nation.
None of us would deem such an election to be representative of anything other than the self-declared winner's will-to-power. All of us, I imagine, would wearily turn the page thinking that it was another sad tale of pitiful pre- or anti-democracy peoples in some strange elsewhere.