Stirling Newberry reminds us that five years ago today, in reaction to the worst thing the Supreme Court has done for many, many years, Al Gore conceded the 2000 presidential election to George W. Bush. The country, and the world, are a great deal worse off because of those events. America’s international reputation has been nearly destroyed by our government’s reckless and foolish actions, and corruption and sleaze hold sway in the halls of power while corporate greed and callousness run unchecked throughout the country.
And one more thing: a lot of people who should be alive today are dead.
There is much to do. Let’s do it.
Please share widely!
what were they supposed to do?
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The voting results were within the margin of error of the polling system. We were never going to know who really won. What would have be fair was insisting on a run off election. But that’s not what the law says.
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So what do you propose should have been done?
In the case of the Supreme Court, the answer is very simple: They should have stayed out of it. There was no justification for reviewing the Florida court rulings at a federal level, and certainly no justification for overturning or vacating them. The Supreme Court’s only reason for getting involved in this case at all, was a desire to stop any activity that might possibly lead to Gore being declared winner.
If you’re asking about Gore, well, at the time he conceded, given everything he’d done until that point and everything else that had happened, you’re right, he had no choice. But he shouldn’t have been in that position to begin with. A lot of that is not his team’s fault, but some of it is.
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They should have put more energy and talent into the butterfly ballot lawsuit, rather than treating it as something that could never work. They should have, very early when disputes over recounts first began, started demanding repeatedly for a full hand count of the entire state. They should not have bought into the “closure” canard in any way, and should have insisted that what Americans really want is confidence in the election result, however long that takes – though could have talked about other elections where states didn’t finish selecting their electors until much later. They should have aggressively pursued their case from the beginning, and at every front, because they were right. But, because they were right, they trusted to the process to get the right results, and that allowed Bush’s team to walk all over them.
That depends on your definition of “really”. For the highly technical definition that the Bush people preferred, yes, the results were within the margin of error. But for several reasons (the butterfly ballot, the voter purge list, absentee ballot fraud by Republican counties, etc), we know that more than enough votes for Gore got excluded (legally, in many cases) to remove any doubt that Gore was the “real” winner by a broader definition.
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There’s a compelling case to be made for going with the strictly technical definition. But in that case, the correct remedy was pretty clear: a full statewide hand count of all ballots. That would give a definitive technically correct result, one way or the other – even if it turned out to be within the margin of error.
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Personally, I don’t buy that compelling case. I think, for example, that either a statistical adjustement or re-vote in Palm Beach county should have been ordered by a judge. There was definite precedent for that. Unfortunately, Gore’s team didn’t even ask a judge for it, so precedent didn’t matter – they were not going to get it if they didn’t argue for it.
The fact that Gore lost(?) in 2000 was the ass-kicking I needed to get more involved in political campaigns.
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I had such a bad feeling after the recall was stopped and the SCOTUS got involved. It felt like a coup then. It still does today.