Old News, but a Great Quote
[Although] we may never know with complete certainty the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.
~Justice Stevens dissenting in Bush v. Gore (US Supreme Court, 2000)
Reading this case with a basic understanding of Constitutional Law is very disturbing. The court uses the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment to deem that the right to have votes counted in an procedurally equal way outweighs the right to have votes counted according to the intent of the voter. While they deem this right a “fundemental” right, they don’t even use the proper test when considering the violation of fundemental rights under the Equal Protection Clause. This limits the decision to only this one case. To make it even worse, the court waited until the very day that a recount had to be finished before it gave it’s opinion. This allowed Florida no chance to comply with the EP Clause standard created by the court. Justice Stevens hit the nail on the head!
Really? I had this all wrong. I thought counting all those hanging chads, etc… was an attempt to “guess” the intention of the voter.
What the heck were those poll workers doing then?
That is what they were doing, but because they weren’t all doing it under the same set of guidelines the recount violated equal protection. So in the end the recounted votes were not considered and the original vote count determined the winner.
The question is, why is the procedure of vote counting a fundemental right but determining the intent of the voter not?
Also, if recounting by hand does not provide equal protection,if different guidlines are being used, how can the use of different voting machines with differnt levels of error be Constitutional?
Because the Justices on our great Supreme Court are partisan.