Kakki wrote:
"As for question no. 4, I don't see why it qualifies as suspicious - Bush
did
win - 3 times now."
Yes, Bush "won": by a statistically insignificant margin of 537 out of 6
million, utilizing the votes that were counted, in the condition in which
they were delivered, under the circumstances in which they were cast (e.g.
West Palm Beach and those counties utilizing archaic voting machines), in
the deplorable morass that the nation has come to recognize as Florida
voting. That's the problem.
After listening and reading account after account for four weeks, I
personally believe that, if the vote of every voter who intended to vote for
Gore and walked out of the voting booth firmly believing that he or she had
done so had been actually counted as such, we'd be hearing news reports
today of the cabinet plans of President-elect Gore. The problem is, not
only can my assertion not be proven with any reliability to speak of, but
counting many of these votes as they actually exist is problematic in the
extreme. Even I, a staunch partisan, see the difficulties inherent in every
single attempt to try determine what many of us see as the real result:
multiple recounts involving handling and rehandling of cast ballots;
attempting to divine voter intent weeks after the fact by holding dimpled
chads up to the light; the Pandora's box of calling a new election in West
Palm Beach in the highly unlikely event that any judge would ever order it,
etc., etc., etc.. And so I fear that we are left with the very imperfect
results of the 2000 election, such as it was.
I believe, especially after the U.S. Supreme Court's decision today and
Judge Saul's decision on the and law *and facts* a short while ago, that a
George W. Bush presidency is inevitable. And after a month and a spirited
challenge from the Democrats, we should probably get on with letting it
happen. But, like an athlete who won a coveted tournament under highly
unusual or suspicious conditions, he will always have an asterisk by his
name in my book.
Mary P.
