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

a bit late

[syrinx]

If they had gotten all the lawyers earlier, they might have been able to keep Nader off even *more* ballots!

Please stop with the "election stolen" crap.

[TheSHAD0W]

The election was never stolen. The lawsuit was to prevent the Democrats from cherry-picking where and how they recounted votes. Furthermore, a recount WAS completed in early 2001 and Bush still won.

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.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll save you the agony of waiting 20 years. You're wrong about the myth of Black voters being turned away.

In June 2001, following a six-month investigation that included subpoenas of Florida state officials from Governor Jeb Bush on down, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report that found no evidence of voter intimidation, no evidence of voter harassment, and no evidence of intentional or systematic disenfranchisement of black voters.

Headed by a fiercely partisan Democrat, Mary Frances Berry, the Commission was very critical of Florida election officials (many of whom were Democrats). For example, "Potential voters confronted inexperienced poll workers, antiquated machinery, inaccessible polling locations, and other barriers to being able to exercise their right to vote." But the report found no basis for the contention that officials conspired to disenfranchise voters. "Moreover," it said, "even if it was foreseeable that certain actions by officials led to voter disenfranchisement, this alone does not mean that intentional discrimination occurred," let alone racial discrimination.

The Justice Department's Civil Rights Division conducted a separate investigation of these charges and also came up empty. In a May 2002 letter to Democratic Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont, who at the time headed the Judiciary Committee, Assistant Attorney General Ralph Boyd wrote, "The Civil Rights Division found no credible evidence in our investigations that Floridians were intentionally denied their right to vote during the November 2000 election."

Peter Kirsanow, a Republican member of the Civil Rights Commission, told us in an interview that "the press has tried to spin what happened in Florida into something sinister. But there's a disconnect between what was actually found [in these various investigations] and how it's been portrayed."

7 of 9 US Supreme Court justices found there to be constitutional problems with the recount procedures ordered by the Supreme Court in Florida. 5 of 9 didn't think that yet another constitutionally adequate recount could be completed in the time available under Florida law. The US Supreme Court acting to uphold the law ment that the Florida Legislature didn't need to directly appoint the Electors to the Electoral College, which they were preparing to do just in case (and completely within their right) due to the illegitimate actions of the Florida Supreme Court. The "head judge" as you refer to the Chieft Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, was only one voice of 9.

Bush more corrupt than Nixon? That is some kind of joke, right?

You are likely to be quite mistaken about history's evaluation of Iraq vs Vietnam. When the US left Vietnam, there was a ceasefire treaty in place and the North Vietnamese were supposed to withdraw. The US abandoned South Vietnam when the Senate blocked President Ford from assisting South Vietnam defend itself against North Vietnam naked aggression in the form of a conventional invasion. Iraq, on the other hand, may get the assistance it needs to transition to a reasonably free democracy if the United States stands by it. That is more likely if President Bush is reelected. John Kerry, on the other hand, was all for abandoning the South Vietnamese, and has at times indicated he would bail from Iraq. In fact, John Kerry's casual acceptance of thousands of people being executed by the North is quite chilling to read. It is appalling to realize how wrong he was in the numbers. Sadly he seems to not have learned little, if anything, in the years since.

You are right about history being the ultimate judge. It is likely that history will be kinder to President Bush than to President Clinton.

Re:Big shocker here, huh?

[EnronHaliburton2004]

without substanciating this charge with a single piece of evidence

How often do people substantiate their charges in a 20-second radio snippit?

Especially when it can be substantiated so easily:
I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year.

Perhaps misleading?

[lskziq]

The article tells us the democrats "plan to mobilize tens of thousands of lawyers on Election Day." However, the post suggests that their behavior is largely unmatched by the republicans (perhaps I am misinterpreting the poster).

I'm not sure of the implications, but the final paragraph tells us the Bush campaign has $6 million in their legal fund while the Kerry has $4.6 (as of the end of august). I suppose it's unclear whether that's a result of expenditures Kerry has already made or if it indicates the Bush campaign's willingness to engage in similar tactics.

Regardless, I think I agree with the spirit of the poster. This is depressing. Is it better for there to be fierce litigation, proving the affair to be the horse and pony show it is, or for one of these rather lackluster candidates to win a definitive victory?

Do you know your candidates? At least go to http://www.vote-smart.org/ and learn their names.

Re:Perhaps misleading?

[werfele]

The article says Democrats are mobilizing and "lining up" lawyers, but doesn't say anything about hiring them. It does say that they're training thousands of volunteers. That would explain why Kerry is expecting more bang for the buck.

Also, I believe the plan is for the volunteer attorneys to intervene or document instances where people are excluded from the polls. Democrats believe that more voters at the polls will favor them (that's the conventional wisdom). Assuming Repulicans also believe this, they're not likely to want to make the same effort to get people into the polling place, but it would be embarrassing to make an obvious effort to exclude people on election day.

Re:Please stop with the crap.

[Guuge]

Sigh... how soon we forget.

When an election is very close (and the 2000 election was *extremely* close) you can always ask what would have happened if, say, voters weren't improperly purged from the rolls. There are a million ways in which things didn't turn out as maybe they should have.

So please don't ignore the obvious problems of the 2000 election. Pretending that Bush was the obvious winner shows both ignorace and disrespect for democratic values.

Great.

[Anonymous Coward]

That's tens of thousands of lawyers who are now too preoccupied to mess up other things.

Re:I wonder why....

[krymsin01]

Perhaps the reason that the Dems are getting lawyer'd up is that they feel (as do a lot of Americans) that the Republicans stole the last election? I fail to see how that paints liberals in a bad light.

Re:Alright Libertarians.

[Anonymous Coward]

"[I]s there some outstanding battle to get back land?"

Many Native people work every day to get the land back that they would have recieved from their forefathers.

Your forefathers did, yes, and you recieved it from them. It is stolen. What you are saying is as that if your father stole a painting, and you received it from him, then the true owner or the inheritor of his estate doesn't have any right to it anymore.

Perhaps, you're right, perhaps it can't be reasonably undone completely, but it can be undone somewhat. And which Libertarians, those O' so noble defenders of natural rights, have ever given the stolen land they've recieved back to its rightful owner? I'm going to have to lean towards "not a single one."

The native Americans of today are the ones that have had their land taken away. It is their land, they are people to, they have an inalienable right to their own property, and they havve rights to the property of their ancestors passed down to them as their people did for thousands of years before it was mostly stolen by settlers. Their "inalienable" rights are not respected by scarcely anyone apart from themselves. And that's why the Libertarians are hypocrites: they will gladly disrespect others property rights when it benefits them.

Re:Big shocker here, huh?

[Elwood P Dowd]

Maybe because it implies that they are somehow going to rig their machines?

They have rigged their machines, and that is also accepted fact. They have rigged them to remove the possibility of a legitimate audit.

That is certainly different from rigging it for a particular candidate, but the fact that they are willing to do this lesser form of fraud makes it seem completely plausible that they could do a greater form of fraud.

While it is certainly not proven that Diebold machines will be used to give an advantage to GW, it is also not irrational to suspect them. Their machines are begging for election fraud, in favor of either candidate.

Re:Please stop with the crap.

[pudge]

Pretending that Bush was the obvious winner

"Pretending"? He won. Later recounts showed he would have won had the existing (unconstitutional) recount completed. This is all entirely factual, and obvious. No pretending necessary.

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.

Re:I wonder why....

[tsm_sf]

Let's see...

- Republican president
- Republican-controlled House
- Republican-controlled Senate AND
- 5-to-4 Repuglican control of the Supreme Court

And here's How A Bill Becomes A Law

Did we learn NOTHING from Schoolhouse Rock?

Re:I wonder why....

[N3WBI3]

Let's see...
- Republican president
- Republican-controlled House
- Republican-controlled Senate AND
- 5-to-4 Repuglican control of the Supreme Court

President: Yes

House: Yes

Senate: From 2000 - 2002 the Democrats held the majority 50-49-1 (D) - (R) - (I) with the defection for Jeffords who was a republican, went indep, and caucases with the Democrats.

Supreme Court: Neither party controls the court, the court rules for the boy scouts one day, and against the ten commandments the next, the day after striking down a texas sodomy law. It really is a rather unpredictable body right now.
You have two judges who are solidly conservative, two judges who are solidly Liberal, two who lean and one who floats depending on the issue.. Almost every major decision is 5-4 but there is not pattern to what 'side' wins..

Dont feel bad one out of 2 out of 4 is a great average if you were playing baseball...

Yawn... reruns.

[An Onerous Coward]

Remember, last time Al Gore had the army of lawyers, and Bush had a premature declaration of victory from Fox News.

Guess who won.

Still less than the Republicans.

[dtfinch]

To quote the bottom of the article:
Kerry had about $4.6 million in his legal fund at the end of August, and Bush had about $6 million, commission reports show

Re:Still less than the Republicans.

[Banner]

Kerry isn't the one hiring the lawyers. It's the DNC. How much money do THEY have?

Re:Please stop with the crap.

[bsdbigot]

I almost agree with you, here. It doesn't get any closer than Bush vs. Gore, but I don't think we're going to see a landslide for another 12 years. In other words, get used to these legal battles.

You lose me when you start with a salient point, but conclude with partisan BS. There were dozens of lawsuits filed by/on behalf of Bush and Gore, with respect to different issues, in Florida. Republicans initiated many of these suits, but Democrats initiated the rest. IIRC, the majority of these suits were brought by Democrats, and many of them had little or no factual or legal basis whatsoever.

And, let's not forget, we do NOT live in a democracy, so the tired battle cry of "Gore won the popular vote," means nothing. While we can sit here and maybe even be strangely comfortable with a purely democratic system amongst ourselves, a relatively small community of people that share a number of common ideals, the situation is a bit more complex when you take into account the number of people that vote purely on emotion/ego/peer-pressure. Surely, you don't want to bow to the popular opinion of all the people that think Farenheit 9/11 is an unbiased, upstanding representation of facts, just as you probably don't want to subjugate yourself to the will of people that hate Kerry solely based on his post-war activities.

Now, as you are reading this and thinking about what a Republican puppet I am, you can realize that the Electoral College is there to insulate you somewhat from the massive defection that might be caused by my release of a video showing Kerry having goat.cx with a bunch of ketchup bottles, while still giving a great deal more than lip service to your trumpet about democratic values.

As someone over at Despair, Inc. realized, "Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups." I personally like the footnote there about disoriented Palm Beach voters.

Sincerely, a Palm Beach Libertarian

It's your patriotic, anti-terroristic duty!

[rts008]

If EACH and EVERY one of us (EVERYONE nationwide) would just do their duty to Country and Nation by killing 10 lawyers apiece, we might bring teir numbers back under control and end this pestilence!

That's a scary headline....

[flyingsquid]

An army of lawyers.

Hey, if you hire tens of thousands of lawyers, that becomes a veritable "army", you say? Hrm. While we suffer from an excess of lawyers in this country, we need to send tens of thousands of more personnel to Iraq in order to win...

Could it be that the Democrats have a secret plan for how to win the war?

Not rocket science

[jbarr]

From the article:

So they have decided this year to fight legal skirmishes across the country, hoping to change state election rules that make it more difficult for voters to cast ballots. In New Mexico, for instance, the Democrats argued against a rule that would have required new voters to show IDs at the polls, which they said would disproportionately affect minority voters. The state Supreme Court ruled last week in favor of the Democrats.

This is a great example of the contradiction and hypocracy where people want each vote to be counted, verified, and validated, but they are unwilling to put into place a mechanism that properly validates the voter. There are plenty of ways to legally identify yourself, and if you don't take the time to obtain and provide the proper identification, you deserve the consequenses for your lack of responsibility. This is not rocket science.

Much of the Democratic litigation centers on how various states are interpreting a new provision in the federal voting law that gives voters who believe they are registered -- but whose names don't appear on voter rolls -- the right to cast so-called provisional ballots.

WTF. You have had four years since the last election to register. You have had four years of multiple state and local elections and primaries to go and verify that you are properly registered. If you decide not to be involved in the process, then don't expect the process to involve you.

The real problem is gradual the removal of personal responsibility from the process through poltically correct and partisan legislation that is killing a process that should not be rocket science.

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

This is all about "laying the groundwork"

[Shivetya]

Just as having someone "Monitor" the elections. The Democrat party is attempting to setup escape routes should the election be close and they are on the losing end. They are implying that any close election they lose is fradulent. They are even go so far as saying any election they don't win is fraudulent.

Combined with the ever famous use of the race card (Kerry's little speech recently promising that they will NOT allow millions of African Americans from being "disenfranchised" AGAIN") it only shows how low the political parties are willing to go.

If you live in a battleground state I fully expect you to see more local evidence of "election protetection" squads and such. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This is a form of intimidation. It also is an insult to the many public election officials who do a great and THANKLESS job. Remember, 19 out of 20 counties in Florida with voting issues were adminstered by Democrats and the last by an independant. How would you feel if your party was making you out to be a buffoon?

There is just too much money in politics. Political parties are the worst incarnation of a corporation ever seen. Worse they are funded by our money.

I wonder if there will ever be an election where 10% of the House turns over.

Re:You are wrong. Fox did NOT

[Banner]

At 10:00 p.m., which networks took the lead in retracting the premature Florida win for Gore? They were CNN and CBS, not Fox. (The two networks were using a shared Decision Team.) See Linda Mason, Kathleen Francovic & Kathleen Hall Jamieson, "CBS News Coverage of Election Night 2000: Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations" (CBS News, Jan. 2001), pp. 12-25.)

In fact, Fox did not retract its claim that Gore had won Florida until 2 a.m.--four hours after other networks had withdrawn the call.

Please note that while the networks called Florida for Gore BEFORE the polls had closed (and fox called it for Gore as well), that no one called it for Bush until after 2 IN THE MORNING.

You really need to stop reading socialist sites. Socialist LIE.