Environment & Energy

and working under the election laws that were actually on the books in Florida in 2000. For starters, Al Gore did not run in the Presidential primaries in1992. 2ndly, Palm Beach County election supervisor Theresa LaPore only ran as a democrat because Palm Beach County so overwhelmingly voted for democrats. BTW, her father was a republican and she had a 2nd job as a flight attendant while she was the Palm Beach County election supervisor working for Adnan Khashoggi, a long time and very large campaign donor to the Bush family. Beyond this is the fact that the "butterfly ballot" violated Florida ballot design law at every turn. You would think that someone who'd worked for the Palm Beach county elections department for 25 years would've known what Florida ballot design law actually was but the illegal ballot design she used clearly proved that she had no idea what Florida ballot design law actually was. Lets set the butterfly ballot issue aside.
"The Supreme Court was asked to rule on whether it was acceptable to count just a few counties. There weren’t even uniform standards for the recounts. (I remember watching the coverage of the recounts, with reporters explaining how the various counties were doing the recount.) While I didn’t like the end result of the Supreme Court's ruling, It’s difficult for me to take issue with it. They said (in essence) all votes are equal, and (here’s the kicker) there isn’t enough time to do a proper recount of the whole state. (Which, I’m afraid, was true.)" There are numerous factual problems with your claims in this paragraph. For starters it was Bush who ran to his father's cronies on the SCOTUS because he was a coward who could not accept the Florida Supreme Court's ruling to count the uncounted Florida votes. In addition, the U.S. constitution gives the elected U.S. House of Representatives the authority to settle a disputed Presidential election, not 5 highly partisan, unelected Republican SCOTUS judges. In addition, the U.S. constitution gives the states the authority to run elections which is what the state of Florida was doing in 2000, not 5 unelected highly partisan SCOTUS judges. These 2 po0ints alone make the Bush vs Gore ruling unconstitutional.
It's clear to me that the 5 GOP SCOTUS judges who stopped the legal Florida vote count had no idea what Florida election law in 2000 actually was. For starters, the election laws on the books in Florida in 2000 were passed in the aftermath of the 1876 Presidential election that Florida was also at the center of. In 1876 the Florida statewide canvassing board was controlled by the GOP as it was in 2000. Unlike 2000, in 1876 the votes were counted in Tallahassee. The GOP canvassing board had a very wide latitude for throwing out votes and this GOP controlled canvassing board threw out the votes of 1,800 democrats which was enough votes to change the outcome of the 1876 election. In the aftermath of the 1876 election, the Florida legislature passed laws requiring that all votes where the intent of the voter is clear be counted so that never again would such votes be thrown outon a partisan basis as they were in 1876.. This is a very clear standard and it was the same standard signed into law by Bush when he was Governor of Texas a few years before 2000. BTW, the intent of the voter is the standard that most states use to count the votes. Talk about hypocrisy by Bush and the GOP controlled SCOTUS! In its book "Democracy held hostage", the Miami Herald showed a picture of dimpled chad and finally admitted that the voter's intent was clear. The media was absolutely clueless about actual Florida election law and it showed throughout the coverage. BTW, during the legal proceedings in Palm Beach County, a Palm Beach county punch card voting machine was opened and it was clearly plugged up with chad because it had not been properly cleaned out as required by Florida law before the election. This happened in all of the counties that used the punch card voting machines. They were also the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties in Florida, Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties. The new law further required that the counties would now count the votes instead of the votes being counted in Tallahassee. Under the new law, candidates running statewide would have the right to challenge vote counts that they disagreed with at the county level. There was no more statewide counting of votes. The Gore campaign followed this actual Florida election law to the letter. and filed vote count challenges in the counties with the most uncounted votes. It turned out that these counties were the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties in Florida. The Bush campaign had the same right to file vote count challenges in any Florida counties where they disagreed with the vote counts. The Bush campaign chose not to file any county vote count challenges because they knew that the uncounted votes were located in the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties in Florida. The Bush campaign knew that counting the uncounted votes in these heavily democratic voting counties meant victory for Al Gore ., This is why Jeb and Harris refused to count the votes that the law required be counted by trying to run out the clock and then they went running to the GOP SCOTUS majority to seal their election theft. The Florida Supreme Court correctly called this out and added back the time that Jeb and Harris had wasted. The GOP controlled SCOTUS ruling to stop the legal vote count showed that they had no idea what Florida 2000 election law actually was or why it existed in the form that it did.
The Bush vs Gore ruling shredded the 14th amendment's equal protection clause because the votes not counted were the votes of democrats. Further proof of this is the fact that there were 10,000 absentee ballots located in the most heavily republican voting counties in Florida that the counting machines could not read that were in fact hand duplicated and counted. These ballots favored Bush by more than 2 to 1.The only media reporting of this fact can be found in a 5/7/2001 article by the Orlando Sentinel, "Mangled ballots resurrected". These GOP ballots are in the Jeb/Harris bogus vote total and are what made it possible for Bush to steal the election. Florida election law in 2000 allowed for the hand duplication and counting of ballots that the counting machines couldn't read but that showed voter intent when the ballot was examined by people. The counties were required to keep strict logs of every ballot that was counted in this way. This law applied to all ballots that the counting machines couldn't read and not just absentee ballots in heavily republican voting counties.
It's also important to remember that the media lied about the outcome of the 2000 election with their alleged vote count in 2001.They did so by inventing vote counting scenarios that did not actually exist in Florida election law. This was done so they could write a headline that invented a Bush win. Buried deep within the actual articles was the fact that when all of the votes are counted, Al Gore got the most votes. It's also important to remember that the uncounted votes are located in the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties in Florida. I used to live in south Florida so I know this area well. Bush's odds in this part of Florida were nil at best. By stopping the legal Florida vote count the GOP controlled SCOTUS insured that all GOP votes were counted while blocking the counting of 160,000 votes located in the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties. That's a blatant violation of the equal protection clause. The GOP controlled SCOTUS also let Jeb and Harris get away with running out the clock despite the fact that Hawaii did not submit it's electors slate until January 1961 which was well past the SCOTUS artificial 'safe harbor" deadline.
In conclusion, please don't think that you know more about the 2000 election in Florida. I actually lived there. What the GOP controlled SCOTUS did was to issue an unconstitutional ruling that robbed our country of having a President who well understood the threat of climate change and put our country on the path to dictatorship. There would be no Trump today withought the unconstitutional Bush vs Gore ruling. Our country will never be the same.