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render it a straw man.

Much the way you did in suggesting that the Democrats are the only party that seeks redress in the courts?

What a bunch of hogwash.

The Florida Supreme Court followed Florida law that the "clear intent of the voter" must be followed
Read the opinion. I have. Here is the link. The Florida Supreme Court ruled that the Secretary of State must accept vote counts from county Canvassing board after the deadline set by the Law. (See See 102.166(5), Fla. Stat. (2000)). It demands that the intent of the voter be determined. Bush challenged this, saying that the Florida Supreme Court was wrong to impose this. The Florida Supreme Court claimed in its ruling it was not making election law, however, this precedent was never established by the Legislature. Furthermore, the courts assertion that the Secretary of State must accept tallies after the date the Legislature deemed to be the deadline was clearly, obviously, without a doubt, new law. The Supreme Court ruled that the same standard must apply to all votes and voters in the State of Florida. That was the 7-2 vote. It was pretty clear. You can't have every vote examined on its own basis and try to get what the voter wanted out of it. Even if the Florida Legislature had passed this law it would not have mattered. This is an Equal Protection issue. Clear as day. Two ballots cast by two voters marked exactly the same way could be interpretted differently by the Florida Supreme Courts order. That's just not legal. The 5-4 vote was whether or not the deadline set by hte Legislature was a valid deadline. The dissenting Justices ruled that the Legislature's biggest goal was to ensure every ballot was recounted manually and tabulated. However, 3 USC 7 sets the date that the electoral college meets. If a State has not selected its electors, it forfeits its votes. The US Supreme Court found, like the Florida Supreme Court, that the Florida Legislature has a bigger interest in ensuring that its votes as a state are recognized. This was the "5" part 5-4 decision. If Scalia had recused himself and the vote come down 4-4, the 7-2 vote would have stood - meaning the State of Florida would have had to impose the same standard across all counties. The Decemember 18th date set in 3 USC 7 would cleary (only 6 days from the date of the decision) be missed, and all Floridians would lose their vote. Since no candidate would have recieved 270 electoral votes, the US House would have voted, and Bush would have still one.

The bottom line is this: regarding the election politics, there is not a single ruling that the either the SCOTUS or the Florida Supreme Court could have provided that would have given Al Gore the White House. Not one. If you have the proposed text, or a description of what it was, please by all means be the first to provide it. There was no legal way that a "intent of the voter" standard could be enacted. It's not legal by Florida law, it's not legal by US law, it's not legal by the US Constitution. Even in the best case - if the US Supreme Court never intervened - Gore could not have won.

different (and biased) balloting systems in use in different counties
You someone how hold the Republicans responsible for having more up to date voting equipment. The fact is that the State of Florida does not fund county elections. It is up to the County to handle thier own elections. This is enshrined in State law as well as the State constitution. There are elected officals who are mandated to deal with it. The counties in question where run by Democrats. The only person to blame for these counties poor equipment are the elected Election Board Supervisors. There is no excuse for them keeping 30, 40, 50 year old crappy voting equipment in place. At very worst, they could easily print up a paper ballot on large paper with an empty box next the candidates name. They choose not to do that. And in doing so they ended u

He won, get over it. Unless you happen to have some information that the US Supreme Court overlooked?

I have to give credit to HardOCP for not backing down in the face of ridiculous threats. They posted a factual article that painted an unflattering picture, because the fact's ARE unflattering. I know Florida is home to some of the worst judicial decions ever but here's hoping they get this one right.

This is a typical case of frivolous lawsuits. There are, unsurprisingly, rules against this. If anyone actually fights it out in court, I expect that the Court would in fact grant attorneys fees to Google or the other defendants/counter-plaintiffs, as they have done in other cases. There is precedent for this which is binding in California.

In fact, some courts would consider this a SLAPP case (Strategic Litigation Against Public Participation), trying to restrict the free speech rights of the critics of the web site. Anti-SLAPP suits are great because attorneys fees are automatically granted if you win.

The problem is the up-front cost of litigation. Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done until at least one case goes through the courts. BUT, in the past, some people have been prevented by judgement from suing anyone else, because they were "court abusers." Hopefully this will happen to Mr. Novak.

Oh, and if Slashdot is sued, I'd be happy to help with the defense. I'm no litigator, but writing the reply brief to this would be entertainment, not work.

Thalia

In an interesting opinion, the Florida Supreme Court split 4-3, ultimately adopting the earlier Zeran decision. Most interesting was to read the 3-judge dissenters, who made an interesting argument. This shows how truly fragile merely statutory rights and safe harbors can be.

some time ago - or rather, they never converted to MS Office. Most lawyers use WordPerfect, and WordPerfect is _required_ by courts in many jurisdictions. For an example, see this (PDF file, page 2). The reasons for this are historical; WordPerfect had much better formatting controls than the early releases of MS Word. (When the IBM PC first came out, I recommended WordPerfect to a friend who worked as a legal secretary, and I'm sure she's _still_ using it today, all these many years later.)

Open source StarOffice should develop a WordPerfect file format default option and keyboard/formatting workalike regime, like QuattroPro had a Lotus123 workalike option (for awhile, until Lotus sued Borland about it, IIRC). Then StarOffice might become very attractive to law offices (cost savings, rock-stable OS, low-pain user transition). Lawyers and legal secretaries _really_ hate losing billable time to crashes. Convert law schools, then MBA schools... business will follow, somewhat later.

But the real reason the MS Office/.Net subscription model is likely to fizzle is that it's now an _explicit_ treadmill. Heretofore business could kid itself to upgrade for "new features" and naively think it would have the option to forego future upgrades. For example, Ernst & Young (70,000 users) initially elected not to upgrade to Windows98, prohibited it completely for a year. But Microsoft has just (rather arrogantly) removed all potential for this sort of self-deception. So much for their incremental seduction marketing model in the business community.