Florida Supreme Court Overturns Sauls Ruling:  Orders New Recounts.  (12/8/00)

Further, the court's narrow, liberal majority has made a mockery of the idea of "counting every vote" by selecting only certain ballots and providing no standard to count them. The four activist justices rewrote Florida's election laws after the election -- a clear violation of federal law.

Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Wells offered a stinging and forceful dissent; concluding:

The majority's decision cannot withstand the scrutiny which will certainly immediately follow under the United States Constitution.

The majority's decision to return the case to the circuit court for a count of the under-votes from Miami-Dade County or all counties has no foundation in the law of Florida as it existed on November 7, 2000.

I have a deep and abiding concern that the prolonging of judicial process in this counting contest propels this country and this state into an unprecedented and unnecessary constitutional crisis.

Judge Wells said the county-by county decision-making on the clear indication of the intent of the voter": "is fraught with equal protection concerns which will eventually cause the election results in Florida to be stricken by the federal courts or Congress."

For example, in Miami-Dade County, the justices reinstated 168 votes that were awarded to Gore as the result of manual recounts conducted in only some precincts - all of them overwhelmingly Democratic. This would be the ultimate in treating some votes differently from others.

The Court ordered a recount of all counties' under-votes, but there are five major problems:  First, in many counties the under-votes aren't even segregated, so they will have to be machine tabulated and separated. We know this causes chads to fall off ballots and other degradation of ballots.  Second, 16 counties don't even know which of their non-votes are under-votes and which are over-votes.  Third, even in counties that have attempted to separate the under-vote, there are serious problems. In Miami-Dade, the number of under-votes submitted to the Circuit Court is different from the number identified in the November 8 machine recount. There can be no confidence that the pool of under-votes is untainted and consistent.  Fourth, the majority accepted two different standards (the liberal Broward standard and the more objective Palm Beach standard) further proving votes are treated differently in each county.  ~ Fifth, as Chief Justice Wells said, the liberal court majority failed "to make provision for: (1) the qualifications of those who count; (2) what standards are used in the count-are they the same standards for all ballots statewide or a continuation of the county-by-county constitutionally suspect standards; (3) who is to observe the count; (4) how one objects to the count; (5) who is entitled to object to the count; (6) whether a person may object to a counter; (7) the possible lack of personnel to conduct the count; (8) the fatigue of the counters; and (9) the effect of the differing intra-county standards.]

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