>I think both the Gore and Bush camps think the same thing. The Gore camp
>bases their certainty that they are going to win the hand count on of the
>size of the disparity between the exit polls and the result. The exit
>polls showed Gore leading all day by 4%. That's why the networks called
>it early for him. Those same exit polls were accurate in every other
>state. But here, the voted result came out different. When we are
>observers on elections in other countries, that's precisely the sort of
>evidence we use to assert irregulaties. And the existence of thousands of
>underpunched ballots was exactly what they were hoping to find.
As the microscope is applied to the US presidential election result, there is a lot of evidence that the electoral system tends to disadvantage the less socially successful strata of the population.
So careful scrutiny of rejected votes will tend to favour these strata.
What I am not sure is which legal actions really help "the class struggle", and which get lost in debates about narrow bourgeois right.
The redress for the 19000 disqualified ballots in Palm Beach would seem arguably to be a revote.
On the other hand I would have thought that the Republicans have a strong argument that recounts tend to favour the leading party in any particular county, and it is inequitable for the Democrats to call for manual recounts in Palm Beach and other counties in which they are in a majority, if manual recounts are not used thoughout the state of Florida, whose electoral votes are at stake.
Is Michael Pollak, above, suggesting that the gap between exit polls and the recorded result, which he says occurred only in Florida, substantially due to underpunched ballots? Surely such equipment is also used elsewhere in the USA.
The problem for progressive legal struggles is how to expose the class inequalities in the system, without being caught in the narrow bourgeois concept of equal rights for equal individuals. On the latter the Republicans seem to me to have a strong case that to decide the state of Florida as a whole, they would need manual recounts in all counties, rather than selected ones.
Chris Burford
London