My head just exploded, so I'll try to write this before I die.
 

I was watching the nightly news, and the lead story was that the Bush camp was trying
to get a court to stop the hand count of the Florida votes.  Now, get this...one of the
reasons that was given for the Bush oppostion of the hand counts was that they
believed that it was unconstitutional.

That's when my head exploded.

I assume that GOP thinks that the Constitution only recognizes votes that have been
counted by computer, and are free of bias and the most accurate.  Now, I know that
old Ben Franklin was a smart guy, but I think he stopped short of inventing the computer.
Seems to me that when the Constitution was written, that those votes were COUNTED BY HAND.

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Does anybody else remember how this whole thing got started?
I do.

The networks called Florida a little after 8 PM on election day.
Around 9 PM, Karl Rove comes on one of the networks and announces
that he doesn't believe that forecast and that they think they will win Florida.
Then all of a sudden, the networks take away Florida from Gore's column.

Now...THIS IS AN IMPORTANT POINT!  There has been a LOT of debate going on
about the influence of the media predicting the result of an election before all of the voters
have finished voting.  The theory being that if someone hears that one candidate has won
a particular state, that the remaining voters will just stay home.

Here's ANOTHER disturbing theory...what happens if the media predicts that a candidate wins
a particular state WHILE THE VOTES AND BALLOT BOXES ARE BEING COLLECTED???

Here's the way I see it...all of the national media outlets call Florida for Al Gore at 8 PM.
Karl Rove flies into a fury and calls Jeb Bush.  Karl tells Jeb "you may not have gotten enough
votes for your brother, but you can certainly make sure that Al Gore doesn't get as many."

Next thing you know, in the hours between Karl Rove appearing on TV and the prediction that
Bush won Florida, a lot of ballot boxes from heavily Democratic areas of Florida start to fall off trucks.

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I used to work at polling places on election day.  Of course, here in Pennsylvania,
which is ABOVE the Mason-Dixon line, we use computerized touch-pads to elect
our candidates.  When a voter comes in, we check their name, make them sign the book,
and record their name on a master list.  Then they vote on the machine, and the machine
gives a running tally of how many votes were cast.  Then the polling place workers can
check to make sure that the number of voters on the master list matches up with the number
of votes cast on the ballot.  In almost every case, the numbers match up EXACTLY,
with a few excpetions, when maybe one vote was lost out of hundreds.

The point being...it is almost IMPOSSIBLE for a vote to be "lost."
Ain't technology great?
But hey...I'm up here in Pennsylvania, which Gore WON.
Isn't it a coincidence that the better, more accurate, and more technologically powerful
the voting method, the better the chances that Gore won?

Heck, isn't it true that in Alabama, if you want to vote for Bush, you throw a red rock
into a bucket, and if you want to vote for Gore, you throw a blue one in??

ha ha