Democrats Hire Army of Lawyers for Elections

Neil Blender writes in that the Democrats are hiring tens of thousands of lawyers to contest election results. This is nothing new, except for the apparent magnitude of it, and it gives the idea of tort reform a whole new meaning. The Republican party is relying on state parties to hire the lawyers, if necessary.

Comments

Re:Please stop with the "election stolen" crap.

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Unless you count black voters who were turned away from the polls. Where Bush's brother was Governer. Gee. In Florida. Who would have imagined.

Where the head judge who oversaw the recount effort was friendly enough with Dick Cheney to go duck hunting.

That story has nepotism and corruption written all over it. Sounds more like a corrupt 3rd world country then the great, fair United States.

Here is the bright side of things-- even if Bush does win the 2004 elections, history will be the ultimate judge.

In 20 years, Bush will be looked upon as a president who was even more corrupt then Nixon, and the Iraqi war will be seen as pointless as the Vietnam war.

Many lessons will hopefully be learned from our current times. History books will discuss our era in detail-- Unfortunately I fear that many of these lessons will only be learned through pain and death.

Lord help us though the trying times to come.

I hope I am wrong.

Republican Party may Schism check this out!

[isotope23]

Republican Bob Barr (of all people) just wrote this article here is the last couple of paragraphs :

Bush's problem is that true conservatives remember their history. They recall that in recent years when the nation enjoyed the fruits of actual conservative fiscal and security policies, a Democrat occupied the White House and Congress was controlled by a Republican majority that actually fought for a substantive conservative agenda.

History's a troublesome thing for presidents. Even though most voters don't take much of a historical perspective into the voting booth with them, true conservatives do. Hmmm. Who's the Libertarian candidate again?

If someone like bob barr endorses Badnarik, this could get REALLY interesting.

Would it matter

[phyruxus]

how many lawyers they hire? During the florida court case about the ballot shenanigans, the Supreme Court stepped in and ruled that figuring out who did what and how many votes were for who was not permissible because it would "damage the legitimacy of the Bush presidency".

We (the US) don't need lawyers, we need UN monitors, and we've got those. Of course it wouldn't hurt if the media would hold off reporting a winner until there actually is one; the "gentlemanly" thing to do would be to stop depending on "forecasts" and guesses about projected winners, and wait until there's actually a winner, beyond a shadow of a doubt.

Also less experience than the Republicans.

[elwinc]

Let me direct your attention to a long article in the Atlantic. Oops, it seems to have become subscriber only; here are some large excerpts. This looks like the full text.

Let me quote a few paragraphs:

But the 2000 election was not Rove's closest race. That had come earlier, and serves as a greater testament to his skill. In 1994 a group called the Business Council of Alabama appealed to Rove to help run a slate of Republican candidates for the state supreme court. ...

Newspaper coverage on November 9, the morning after the election, focused on the Republican Fob James's upset of the Democratic Governor Jim Folsom. But another drama was rapidly unfolding. In the race for chief justice, which had been neck and neck the evening before, Hooper awoke to discover himself trailing by 698 votes. Throughout the day ballots trickled in from remote corners of the state, until at last an unofficial tally showed that Rove's client had lost--by 304 votes. Hornsby's campaign declared victory.

Rove had other plans, and immediately moved for a recount. "Karl called the next morning," says a former Rove staffer. "He said, 'We came real close. You guys did a great job. But now we really need to rally around Perry Hooper. We've got a real good shot at this, but we need to win over the people of Alabama.'" Rove explained how this was to be done. "Our role was to try to keep people motivated about Perry Hooper's election," the staffer continued, "and then to undermine the other side's support by casting them as liars, cheaters, stealers, immoral--all of that." (Rove did not respond to requests for an interview for this article.)

...

The race came down to a dispute over absentee ballots. Hornsby's campaign fought to include approximately 2,000 late-arriving ballots that had been excluded because they weren't notarized or witnessed, as required by law. Also mindful of public relations, the Hornsby campaign brought forward a man who claimed that the absentee ballot of his son, overseas in the military, was in danger of being disallowed. The matter wound up in court. "The last marching order we had from Karl," says a former employee, "was 'Make sure you continue to talk this up. The only way we're going to be successful is if the Alabama public continues to care about it.'" ...

The recount stretched into the following year. On Inauguration Day both candidates appeared for the ceremonies. By March the all-Democratic Alabama Supreme Court had ordered that the absentee ballots be counted. By April the matter was before the Eleventh Federal Circuit Court. The byzantine legal maneuvering continued for months. In mid-October a federal appeals-court judge finally ruled that the ballots could not be counted, and ordered the secretary of state to certify Hooper as the winner--only to have Hornsby's legal team appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, which temporarily stayed the case. By now the recount had dragged on for almost a year.

When I went to visit Hooper, not long ago, we sat in the parlor of his Montgomery home as he described the denouement of Karl Rove's closest race. "On the afternoon of October the nineteenth," Hooper recalled, "I was in the back yard planting five hundred pink sweet Williams in my wife's garden, and she hollered out the back door, 'Your secretary just called--the Supreme Court just made a ruling that you're the chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court!'" In the final tally he had prevailed by just 262 votes. Hooper smiled broadly and handed me a large photo of his swearing-in ceremony the next day. "That Karl Rove w