Re: CHAT (POLITICS!!!): Putting the duh in Florida

En respuesta a Chrisophe Grandsire quien escribió:

<<<
Well, that post gives me the opportunity of asking a question about
all this. I
know it's way off-topic, but it's only a genuine question from a
French point of
view. Well, if I understood correctly, not only the machines didn't
count votes
correctly, but also the vote ballots themselves were ambiguous and the
whole
thing went wrong in some counties of Florida. So, my question is:
instead of
endlessly counting and recounting ballots, which each time gives a
different
result, and is subject of all those political and judiciary problems,
why didn't
the authorities of the counties where the problems appeared consider
simply that
the vote process had been irregular, and that they would organize a
new voting
day? If they had done that as soon as the first week, by now the
elections could
have been done again and the results (this time undebatable) would be
known by
now and not subject to those endless complains. This already happened
in some
places in France for MP elections, and the problems were solved simply
this way.

Well, don't take me wrong. I'm just asking why this seems not to be
even a
possibility. Is there a constitutional or legal reason why they cannot
even
propose such a solution?
>>>
Well, with so close margins a new elections in some counties in
Florida would be thought as cheeting: "we already know that the
margins are close, lets vote again to modify the results" kind of
thought.

BTW.  This was found in Usenet:

1.  Imagine that we read of an election occuring 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 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."