Hey, Carl, if it's military votes not being counted that's bugging you, ask yourself how the military voted this time around. Don't know? Me either. I've looked, and I can't find any stories to tell how their votes went. I don't know if that's indicative of anything or not.
I asked the first question, about how we know the White House is not involved, because Jim made a blanket statement to that effect. "No way" he wrote. I just wanted to find out how he knows such a thing.
You made two statements in error in your earlier posts. First, by saying there was no "massive" voter fraud. Massive being a subjective thing, what's massive to me may be a drop in a bucket to you. All things being equal, I'm convnced that there was "massive" voter fraud.
I live in South Florida, and every day after the 2000 election I listened to, and read about (and in some cases heard and saw live) sories of:
- Police from numerous agencies in numerous counties setting up roadblocks on roads leading to polling places. Some officers gave false directions to alternate polling places. Some officers refused to let anybody through until they had had a complete warrants search performed.
- Ballot boxes in highly Democratic precincts that were put into closets at their respective polling places, not to be discovered until the weekend
after the election.
- Thousands of legal voters being told that they were on the now infamous "felon's list" and not allowed to vote.
- Republican lawsuits upheld by Republican judiciary that actually violated both the letter
and the spirit of the Florida Constitution, and Florida Election law.
I could go on.
For a pretty complete and unbiased record of the events surrounding that time, go here:
Florida 2000 election facts on Wikipedia
The second mistake you made is a common one. You've referred to the:
University of Chicago Florida Ballots Project
If you actually look at the study, you'll find that the ballots were tallied up using eight different standards (hanging chads and all that). In four, Bush won. In four others, Gore won. I think the one that counts most (if you'll forgive the pun) is this: In the tally where they used the same standards as the local elections boards would have used, Gore would have won.
Was Gore cheated? I believe so. Would he have been a better President? I think so. Is that all water under the bridge? Maybe... maybe not. If you look at that time as a low point in American jurisprudence, you'll recognize that we
must strive for far greater accountability in the way our votes get handled once they've left our hands. I, for one, feel that the person who gets elected is far less important than whether or not the will of the American people has been made known. I almost have no choice but to think "Remember 2000" should be a rallying cry for honesty, amongst both Democrats, and Republicans...
Perhaps we should add "Remember '04" to our songbook. Remember, if one party can steal a few votes this year, then either one can steal them all, another day...