The Ninth Circuit Got It Right

The Wall Street Journal ^ | September 18, 2003 | LAURENCE H. TRIBE

[Atlas Sneezed]

It's wrong to hold an election if some voters will be disfranchised.

There is palpable hypocrisy in the complaints one hears about the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals' decision in the California gubernatorial recall. People moaned and groaned about a hanging chad here and a dimpled chad there in Florida in the election of 2000 and succeeded in getting the federal judiciary to throw away thousands of ballots still uncounted as of an arbitrary date (Dec. 12, 2000). Their complaint was with the randomly distributed risk that similar-looking ballots would be read differently at different times or places given that Florida law refused to impose any uniform and objective formula for translating ambiguously punched ballots into definite votes.

[Pukin Dog]

Tribe is a Communist and everyone knows that.

[friendly]

Tribe is a notorious traitor and mega-sc*mb*g corrupt shyster.

[xrp]

Neal Boortz posted this on his website:

Optical scanners have an error rate of 3.3%
Touch screen systems have an error rate of 3.0%
Data Vote systems have an error rate of 3.2%
Punch Cards? They have an error rate of 2.5%

[austinTparty]

Tribe is P.O.'ed because he lost that case and therefore didn't get to be a SCOTUS nominee of a president Gore. He is, however, disingenuous and wrong on this matter.

[Paul C. Jesup]

Better to disfranchised the socialist useful idiots, than the conservatives.

[Diogenesis]

Mr. Tribe is confused. The Decision ROBS Californians of their right to vote.

It also ignores the SCOTUS decision. He should reread it.

---

[Adder]

What? No barf alert?

Tribe is emminently WRONG. There IS a definite date for the election in CA to be held. No, it may not be Oct. 7 but it was like 60 days from certification. The state didn't say the machines were unreliable as he is suggesting, the 9th based their opinion on misquoting the state as was reported elsewhere. More straw grasping and outright LIES.

[boomop1]

Tribe is always on the loser side and the court decision will be overturned as usual for that court. Commie Tribe will just stay in his protective cover of Harvard.

[Porterville]

tens of thousands votes have already been cast... the Communist Ninth was too late in their subterfuge

[onedoug]

"...if some voters will be disfranchised."

No uncertainty there. It's absolute. No individual responsibility. It's all "collective".

[PRND21]

Mr. Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School, is co-counsel for the parties challenging California's procedure and represented Vice President Al Gore in Bush v. Gore.

[Diogenesis]

Mr. Tribe's previous client.

[L.N. Smithee]

The Ninth Circuit's critics aren't being wholly inconsistent with the game they played in the 2000 election: they're again hanging onto a purely arbitrary, artificial deadline (there it was midnight on Dec. 12; here it's the arbitrary Oct. 7 date)

"Arbitrary?" "Artifical?" This is a bald-faced lie and Tribe knows it.

The problem with "the history books" is that it is guys like Tribe who write them.

[martin_fierro]

Professor Tribe takes a lot of ink to say, "The system that voted Gray Davis into office is unqualified to vote him out of office."

[PRND21]

Perhaps Al should invent a touch tone phone and a machine to eliminate those man boobs. ;)

[Onelifetogive]

It's wrong to hold an election if some voters will be disfranchised.

I agree!

We should not hold any elections where the polling place is further from one person's house than from another person's house.
We should not hold any election while anyone serving in the military is out of the country. (Dims disenfranchised many military votes due to no fault of the votor.)
We should not hold any elections while some people have mental problems that result in their disenfranchisement.
We should not hold any election if until everyone has equal access to an automobile for transportation to polling places.
We should not hold any election as long as any votors are undicided about who to vote for.
I reject this silly notion of "separate but equal" polling places. We should not hold any elections until ALL voters in a state use the SAME polling place. The line must be the same length when each votor arrives to vote and the single polling place must be equally distant from every voter's home.

[PISANO]

December 12th is NOT an arbitrary date. Commie TRIBE knows that.

[snopercod]

You forgot the BARF ALERT!. Tribe made a factual error in the second sentence (ballots were not counted), and I stopped reading after that.

[InterceptPoint]

Here is what Tribe states: ...they're again hanging onto a purely arbitrary, artificial deadline (there it was midnight on Dec. 12; here it's the arbitrary Oct. 7 date

This is so typical of the libs. The fact that the dates are written into Florida LAW or the California CONSTITUTION doesn't seem to phase this guy. The dates are still "arbitrary" to Tribe. This is the problem with "flexible" laws and "Living Constitutions". They just mean whatever the (liberal) Judge wants them to mean at the time.

This is not rule of law. This is not even anarchy. This is slavery.