What I'm doing now about the electionNow that i've had a chance to cool off, I think the seminole and martin decisions were actually reasonable, in hindsight. it was the republican operatives who committed the crime...the voters themselves would PROBABLY have noticed that they didn't get an absentee ballot, and just vote at the polls. as for the butterfly ballot, the big problem there was lack of a suitable remedy. a judge can't count double punched ballots in the tally (it's illegal). so there was no legal remedy, even if you totally convinced the judge. We have a system of government. It's inefficient. It's unfair at times. Do you think the US Supreme Court ruled correctly? Suppose you think that a 5-4 split decision of the US Supreme Court is the correct answer under the law and that it was indeed proper for Scalia and Thomas not to recuse themselves (both had wives or sons who work for the Bush campaign). Then that means you must also believe that almost half the judges on the Supreme Court got it wrong. That means that judges make mistakes, even state and federal Supreme Court Justices. That's obvious. If judges didn't make mistakes, we'd have no need for appeals. So is there anything special about the US Supreme Court that proves that the majority always interprets the law correctly? Of course not. The only thing special about the US Supreme Court is that there is no one to appeal the decision to. Time published a great story (Dec 25 by Adam Cohen) about just how stupid this particular US Supreme court decision was (and how it totally conflicts with principles the same justices established earlier). But this is our system and we have to all play by the rules of that system. While I do not think our justice system operated the way I think it should have in this election in Florida, it's the system we have and we have to accept the results of that system. I don't think it is constructive to complain about how unfair the system was in this case. I do think it is constructive to discuss how we can have the system operate more fairly in the future. I'm supporting the ACLU efforts in Florida with a $100K grant to ensure what happened in Florida doesn't happen again (in Florida and other state). I'm also making sure to maintain my contacts with influential people in the Bush administration and try to help Bush succeed in improving education, making the world a safer place to live, and other programs that we can all agree on are good things to do. And lastly, I will input my thoughts to the MIT/Caltech effort on voting. Some final thoughts:
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