Politicians, their lawyers, and Equal Protection

Eric Black of MinnPost says it well this afternoon.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, Repub of Texas, who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee and might therefore be viewed as less than an impartial commentator, says that Dems who tell Coleman to give it up are guilty of "blatant hypocrisy" because their current position -- don't count any more ballots -- contradicts the position they took -- keep counting -- in 2000 when the U.S. Supreme Court canceled the Florida statewide recount thus making G.W. Bush president. In the interest of brevity, Sen. Cornyn did not find space to comment on the hypocrisy of Repubs who have made an opposite switcheroo between the Bush/Gore and the Franken/Coleman cases.

He has a good point. Politicians take the side that looks good at the moment and attorneys argue whatever point of law is on the side of whoever is paying them. Do you really think things would be much different if the numbers were the other way around?

I doubt whether Norm Coleman or Al Franken reads anything here.

So I won’t try to tell either of them what to do next. [After all, even if one of them happened upon this place, there is no reason to believe they would pay attention to what I am writing.]

[Old time SNL watchers: Remember when the 1980s were going to be the “Al Franken Decade”? Are we now looking at a “Al Franken recount decade”?]

I am tired of the hypocrisy on both sides. It’s just that the hypocrisy on the Coleman side stands out worse because of one simple matter: FRANKEN HAS THE VOTES AND IT IS UNLIKELY THAT HE WON’T WHEN ALL IS SAID AND DONE.

Our election laws and procedures have been shown to be remarkably good. An election this close will show the imperfections and we need to be willing to react to what we have learned, but we do darn good. It is just that there is no good tool available to measure something so close adequately. It is like trying to guess who wins an Olympic race when clocks measuring thousandths of a second cannot distinguish a winner.

But Norm’s claim that not all ballots are being counted equally, while perhaps somewhat true, misses a big point. We do have more equal treatment of ballots statewide than we have ever had before. We once had a mixture of hand-counted paper ballots, machine counted paper ballots, lever machines [which left no paper trail], and [if I understand correctly] even a few jurisdictions using punch card ballots. Now we all vote with paper ballots which makes a recount like we have just seen possible, with every ballot and ballot application open to review by observers of all/both sides.

I will try to avoid this subject for a while. It’s getting tiring.