Sestak
jk2020
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Posts: 13,284
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« on: June 29, 2018, 05:30:14 PM » |
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No, it was the wrong decision.
George W. Bush alleged, and the Supreme Court agreed (not the lower federal courts; just the Supreme Court), that the methods of counting ballots in the recount violated the Equal Protection Clause. There was no uniform standard for determining a legally valid vote; some counties treated a dimpled chad as a valid vote and some counties didn't. Because the standard was not uniform statewide, voters were not being treated equally, which violated the Equal Protection Clause. That's the gist of the Court's reasoning. The legal problem with that argument is that there is no precedent ever dealing with the issue of how ballots should be counted. None of the precedents cited by the Court had ever dealt with ballot-counting. Furthermore, it's nonsensical to say that with the Equal Protection Clause having been violated, the solution to the problem is to stop the recounts from continuing. To paraphrase Vince Bugliosi, if any violation of the Equal Protection Clause did occur in the Bush v. Gore case, it did not occur until the US Supreme Court itself stopped the recounts.
On of the most galling things about the Court's opinion is near the very end:
Methinks I sense a guilty conscious.
Bingo.
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