Walker said he cannot “fashion a remedy in the dark.”
Here’s a suggestion: Allow them more time to count all the votes.
Seems quite simple to me Judge Mark Walker (remember that name).
wonder who appointed the guy…
Obama
This just seems stupid, well if we don’t know exactly how long it will take i guess we should just toss votes??? How does that make any sense, its not like we are talking about a difference of weeks or anything.
Florida seems to have a history of tossing votes.
Bullshit.
Fucked
Again
Seriously, what’s the rush? The new Congress doesn’t convene until the first week of January.
Yeah what is the rush? I would think this is important enough that rushing would not even be an issue - getting it right should be the only issue.
The problems are that Florida statutes set deadlines for each part of the recount process. So if you extend the deadline for the machine recount indefinitely, you are pushing up against the deadlines for the manual recounts and eventual certifications. So at some level, the judge is being asked to throw out the entire statute, which will brings up another can of issues.
We may be, we simply do not know. My understanding is Palm Beach County has some very old machines, and has to do a machine count on each race individually. Given the number of ballots they have to process, that could take an extremely long time. It took us about 24 hours to do a small county whose entire voter population is probably smaller than some precincts in Palm Beach, with a fast machine, just to give some context.
@tena the rush is State statutes that mandate certain deadlines. I agree, that such deadlines are rather arbitrary, and from what I read of the Judge’s ruling, it appears he does too. But they are what they are.
The state is being run by the gop…the problems benefit them so they were not in a hurry to fix the problems
U.S. District Judge Mark Walker
We have been the laughingstock of the world, election after election, and we chose not to fix this
UNSAID… is the reason they choose not to fix it… to keep the Republicans in power
I understand the judge’s frustration and anger about how this crap happens over and over and over again—but is essentially shortcircuiting the counting at this point the answer to the problem?
If I’m not mistaken, when the judge says he “can’t fashion a remedy in the dark,” he is signaling that he could grant some kind of extension if he knew more about the situation in Palm Beach County and any other laggards. (Broward, amazingly, has finished its machine recount.) So my read is that the deadline is not absolute just because it’s written into state law.
But I don’t know if Nelson and the Democrats get another bite at this particular apple.
The overarching problem was created by the Florida Legislature, which
Walker said passed a recount law that appears to run afoul of the 2000 Bush v. Gore decision, by locking in procedures that do not allow for potential problems.
The article doesn’t seem to explain this assertion, it just leaves it hanging there.
I don’t understand how one can assert that the amount of time taken to count the votes initially is not an acceptable amount of time to perform a recount.
…said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000.
Oh, you mean the decision that was never to be used as precedent? Please.
The counts initially are done at the various precinct locations. The machine recounts are then done at a central location, usually the Supervisor of Election’s office.
https://www.pbcelections.org/PollingPlaces.aspx?eid=0
That’s a list of all of the precincts in Palm Beach.
A federal judge slammed Florida on Thursday for repeatedly failing to anticipate election problems and said the state law on recounts appears to violate the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that decided the presidency in 2000.
Wait a minute. Didn’t the SCOTUS say that their ruling in 2000 was not to be used as precedent?