Jack Balkin, the Knight Professor of Constitutional Law at Yale, has a post linking to a number of things he's written in the past on this subject. Balkin stresses that for him the most disturbing part of the whole episode wasn't the rulings by the US Supreme Court or the Florida Supreme Court, but instead actions taken by the Republican Party to block the voting rights of black Americans, actions that seem to be in full swing again. That this hasn't and isn't getting more attention is disgraceful, but sadly it's not entirely surprising given the political and social context in which these events are occurring.
For those of you interested in the 2000 election and Bush v. Gore, you may want to see if you can find the most recent issue of Perspectives on Politics (one of the publications of the American Political Science Association). That issue contains several articles dealing with issues tied to the cases and the vote counting, one of the interesting topics being variation in the counting of ballots that arrived after election day. Without even getting into recounts, overvotes, hanging chads or any of that, Gore actually received more votes in Florida on (and before) election day. President Bush won (among other reasons) because of votes that came in during the following weeks in November. One of the articles discusses how various counties counted those ballots and the considerable success of Republican lobbyists in trying to get some of those votes counted and others not.
Posted by armand at September 28, 2004 01:03 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics