Alleged chicanery

[Thomas Smith]

On this point, you should be aware that there are now reports (how reliable
I have no idea) that some substantial portion of the Palm Springs County
ballots that were spoiled because they had two votes for President on them,
are ballots that were handed in by voters who realized they had made a
mistake, and requested an additional ballot, as they have the right to do
under Florida law, I am told.  Just to be clear-- a bunch of people
apparently voted for two people, said, oops!, handed that ballot in as
spoiled, requested another ballot, and voted that one, probably correctly,
and probably for Gore.  The spoiled ballots are kept for some time,
apparently.  So just because there are 19,000 spoiled ballots, does not
mean 19,000 people did not get to vote for Gore.  Perhaps the great
majority of them did.  Whether the officials keep spoiled and replaced
ballots separate from just spoiled ballots, as they obviously should, I
don't know.  How difficult it would be to inflate your total of the latter,
i.e. spoiled but not replaced ballots, I also do not know.  However, claims
that the election in Florida would have come out otherwise had the Palm
Beach ballot been a model of clarity, based on the numbers we have, are
pure speculation.  Not utterly implausible, I grant you. But
speculative.  Here's another speculation.  If the networks had not
incorrectly called Florida at 7 pm EST, Bush would have won the popular
vote by 2 percent, as most polls predicted he would.  Perhaps everyone who
did not vote before 7 pm should now get a chance to vote.  One more
question.  How difficult would it have been for PSC election officials to
take a ballot voted for Bush (hole 1) and punch out Buchanan (hole 2) as
well, thus deliberately spoiling the ballot?  This strikes me as another
form of vote fraud that would impossible to disprove, if a corrupt official
managed to have custody of the ballots for the (probably brief) time necessary.
Tom Smith

At 01:59 PM 11/10/00 -0600, you wrote:
>Paul Finkelman wrote:
>>as Richard Dougherty did in a recent posting, that the people in Palm
>>Beach Co. were trying to vote twice
>Paul:Please. I didn't say people were trying to vote twice. What I said was:
>"But people haven't been denied "the right to vote," what they're being
>denied is the right to vote twice."
>They did vote twice, and when you do, the election rules say that vote is
>discounted. I sincerely don't understand why people would vote twice, and
>maybe others can help me. Did they think they were voting once for Gore
>and once for Lieberman? (My guess, by the way.) Or is it, as many are
>saying, that they voted for Buchanan and then realized their mistake? Here
>it would be good to gather evidence from election officials about how many
>people asked for a new ballot after voting for Buchanan and realizing
>their mistake. My question, then, was that knowing they could only vote
>once, why did they vote again? Perhaps they thought the second vote would
>override the first somehow. (Again, that's my guess.) If so, it's
>unfortunate that they erred, but that alone doesn't mean we should have a
>new election, absent other factors (which you and others have raised as
>legitimate questions).
>(Another question, for another day, perhaps: why is the whole ballot
>thrown out when there is a double-vote in one race? Were it not, we'd be
>better able to test theories about who those votes were really intended for.)
>Richard Dougherty

Thomas A. Smith
Professor of Law
University of San Diego
5998 Alcala Park
San Diego CA 92110
619. 260. 2318
tacsmith at acusd.edu
tacsmith at home.com
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