bending the rules to allow chads to be counted which could swing the election to ALGORE. Some voters are more equal than others and some decisions are more stupid than others. The case the Supreme Court relied on was an Illnois case when Illnois has long been noted as the Capitol of vote fraud. The New York Times was commenting on the scholarly nature and high esteem of the Florida Supreme Court. Ha Ha Ha. The Chief Justice must have set the record for the length of a question 18 minutes into the hearing asking the questions Monday afternoon when the question rambled on and on and on and on and on and finally ended with the famous phrase "Do you get my drift?" That would be difficult because the question was so long and rambling that the chief judge probably lost his own drift. The "fog index" of that question would have been 10 or 20 years above the PHD level. It was pathetic. Talk about a political decision. The legacy of Lawton Chiles who appointed most of these characters lives on. When are these guys coming up for their vote of confidence when the Florida voters can decide whether or not to retain these judges? That will be interesting. Al least ALGORE finally found a decision that he likes. We will see if he will accept that decision if they can not find enough dimpled chads to elect him.

-- Thomas Paine (Thomas@what.next), November 22, 2000

Answers

The Florida Supreme court did NOT "rely" on the Illinois Supreme Court; they cited a case from that court as part of their opinion.

If you had read the whole document yourself, you would have known this-in fact, if you knew how the law operates at all, you would have known this. If you cared at all about what the opinion really said, you would have looked at ALL the citations in the opinion and read the opinions of those cases.

It is clear there were conflicts in the Florida statutes. It is the role of any state supreme court in this position to rely on previous state case law in resolving the ambiguities. They did not "rewrite" the law; they resolved conflcits in the statutes.

-- FutureShock (gray@matter.think), November 22, 2000.