Most of the attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 ruling on Dec. 12 halting Florida’s statewide manual recount have proceeded from the assumption that the Florida Supreme Court had acted reasonably-or at least defensibly-in its stunning, 4-3 decision four days before to order the rushed recount. The assumption is wrong, as I demonstrate below, and my next column will discuss what the U.S. Supreme Court should have done about the Florida case.
The Florida court’s decision was so blatantly, one-sidedly pro-Gore that but for the U.S. Supreme Court’s intervention, it would have had the foreseeable effect of rigging the recount in the guise of "counting every vote." To be precise, the Florida court’s decision-aside from making a hash of Florida’s election laws and denying George W. Bush any semblance of due process-awarded Al Gore several hundred more "votes" than he would have gained from any fair and credible vote-recounting process. If Gore had pulled ahead of Bush by, say, 300 votes in the further recounts ordered by the Florida court, such phony "votes" would have provided his entire margin of victory, and then some.
I won’t focus here on legalisms. Let’s just count the votes, as the saying goes. Starting with some undisputed numbers from three counties that have received far less attention than they deserve: the Broward 567, the Miami-Dade 168, and the Palm Beach 176. These are the margins (totaling 911) by which the new "votes" generated for Gore exceeded those for Bush in the manual recounts that had already been done, before Dec. 8, by the Democratic-dominated canvassing boards in these three big, mostly Democratic counties. (Superlawyer David Boies, who represented Gore, has repeatedly put the Palm Beach number at 215. He has repeatedly been wrong.)
