(We're continuing my rebuttal to Scrat from another thread here...fish, nimh: I'll get to your questions momentarily.)
It is certainly a hard slog (accurate, yet poorly timed analogy, considering its recent use by Don Rumsfeld to refer to Iraq) to understand in the simplest and shortest way what happened in Florida and why. Here's my take:
The Supreme Court ordered the hand-counting of ballots (specifically, ballots in four counties that recorded 'undervotes', or no obvious vote for President) stopped in Florida because, and I'm quoting
their opinion:
Quote:The Supreme Court of Florida has said that the legislature intended the State's electors to "participat(e) fully in the federal electoral process," as provided in 3 U. S. C. Sec. 5. That statute, in turn, requires that any controversy or contest that is designed to lead to a conclusive selection of electors be completed by December 12. That date is upon us, and there is no recount procedure in place under the State Supreme Court's order that comports with minimal constitutional standards. Because it is evident that any recount seeking to meet the December 12 date will be unconstitutional for the reasons we have discussed, we reverse the judgment of the Supreme Court of Florida ordering a recount to proceed.
In essence: there wasn't enough time left to count the votes.
Now hopefully that leaves out all of, or enough of, the partisan diatribe to be acceptable to everyone.
We can discuss the systemic disenfranchisement of African-American voters in FL prior to the election by Katherine Harris, Clay Roberts and Choicepoint if you like; I've documented this in the forum previously, using the fine research of Greg Palast available at his website and published in his book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
We could discuss the fact the federal election laws require that voting equipment is serviced and used only after it is certified to be in correct working order (sidebar here: the fact that the punch card machines had full chad baskets, had not had the slots cleaned, and did not have new styluses was enough to cause a new election in those precincts that used those machines. These were and are important things that must be done prior to each election. If the chad baskets are full, the chads will hang or dimple. If the slots are not clean the stylus will not push the chad so it cuts on the slots; same result. If the styluses are blunt from use you get the same result again).
However (and this brings us back to the topic of
this thread), all the hanging or dimpled chads only stole the spotlight from the
real problem. An optical scan machine in Volusia Co. read 16,203
minus votes for Gore and 4000
plus votes for Bush
BEFORE any ballots were put through the machine. An observant poll worker found the problem,
but it was not fixed until after all ballots were counted.
You can read about this in Bev Harris' book -- an online version is at the website I cited above twice already.