----- Original Message -----
From: "Kevin Tarr" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 9:26 AM
Subject: Re: *DO* we share a civilization?
> Sorry didn't write that exactly how I meant it. Gore defiantly won CA, no
> questions about that. But I thought the late write in ballots were never
> actually counted so they will always be guesses.
>
I watched the vote count for two weeks afterwards. There is no reason in the
world for any significant number of non-absentee ballots to require more
than a day to be counted. (Recounted is a different story). The ballots
that came in late had to be absentee, and they extended Gore's lead. The
day after election day, your suggestion was quite reasonable. Today, there
is no way for any uncounted absentee ballots to make a difference. There
aren't enough of them.
> Your second paragraph about the NYT: does that mean they are assuming that
> as a class Military ballot are more likely to be Rep while non-Military
are
> more likely to be Dem; or they actually had the votes registered and THEN
a
> Rep was able to get the vote thrown out because of it's late post mark? I
> would think that overall Military people have a lot better reason for
their
> mail being postmarked late, so they are justified in having their votes
> counted.
It was a matter of votes from different counties, some pro-Gore, some
pro-Bush. Let me give a couple quotes from the Times article at:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/ap/20010715/us/overseas_ballots_6.html
Benjamin L. Ginsberg, national counsel to the Bush campaign, recalled those
days as being ``as hardball a game as any of us had ever been involved in.''
.....
"A Bush campaign memo laid out a two-pronged strategy - telling Bush lawyers
how to challenge ``illegal'' civilian votes that they assumed would be for
Gore and also how to defend equally defective military ballots, the Times
said.
Ginsberg acknowledged that they had fought for military ballots while
opposing ballots from civilians. Others involved in the campaign denied it."
It was not just a matter
>And I don't mean just because they are in the Military. I mean that
> the ballots were marked and sealed long before the due date but because of
> handling weren't post-marked until the late date.
That was not the question. The military has a procedure for that. There
might have been ballots post marked at bases in the states after being sent
from military bases, but that was considered acceptable and not part of the
question here. What happened was that the usual mistakes in following
rules, as happened with the butterfly ballot, were accepted from Bush
counties but not Gore counties.
>
> What Sec of State office?
>
Florida's. The same place the "objective" decisions concerning the rules
were coming from. The bottom line is that Gore's victory margin in the
national election was far greater than Bush's in Florida (in %, not just
absolute numbers), and it included the vast majority of absentee ballots. I
had a running debate with a resident list Republican during that time, and
while he predicted it would go away, he finally agreed that the margin was
more than the uncertainty due to any outstanding absentee ballots.
Dan M.
