Democrats are urging elections officials in Broward and Palm Beach Counties to relax their recount standards.
A review in Florida concluded that George W. Bush would have won under strict vote recount standards and that voter confusion cost Al Gore up to 25,000 votes.
If different county recount standards violate equal protection, then the outcome of most contested elections in our history has been unconstitutional.
In public statements by James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state leading the Bush recount team, and in the campaign's legal briefs, the Bush team argued repeatedly that it was unfair and patently unconstitutional for Mr. Gore to seek liberal recount standards in Democratic strongholds "after the game has already been played".
But then the Supreme Court stepped in and ordered the recount to end on the grounds that it violated the Equal Protection Clause to have different recount standards in different counties.
Eugene Volokh, a law professor at University of California at Los Angeles, said the agreement by seven justices that the varying recounting standards were constitutionally troubling was consistent with cases in which the court had challenged government's right to discriminate among citizens.
In this section, we briefly recount the standard definition of common knowledge.
Because neither the State Supreme Court nor the trial court that was supervising the recount set standards for how to assess the various ballot permutations, "the court's newly devised scheme for re-tabulating votes is plainly arbitrary, capricious, unequal and standardless," the Bush brief said.
So sitting on its razor-thin lead, the Bushies used every legal maneuver to prevent any recount, by any standard, because it might actually show that more of "We the people" wanted Al Gore, not George W. Bush.
Recounts are a standard democratic tool, although we are not sure why one is needed.
