NO!

Florida’s electors must be challenged due to the fact that they were selected through an Unconstitutional Electoral process rife with equal protection violations.  Though many States have similar problems to correct over the next few years, Florida’s problems became widely evident this year because only there was the winning margin small enough that subtle procedural differences in voting methods could flip the election results; yet the partisan Florida government turned a blind-eye to the need to complete an election that Floridians, and the rest of the nation, could trust as legitimately won.

Specifically, the two most glaring violations were as follows:

�         ‘Error-checking’ disparity – Only 27% of Florida voters had access to error-checking voting equipment (Optical Scan ballots tabulated at the polling place) resulting in a large overvote disparity between counties.

�        Burden of manual inspection process – Only Votomatic voters, 60% of Florida voters on Election Day, were burdened with a meticulous, manual ballot inspection process required to insure that their vote be properly counted due to the flawed Votomatic voting technology.  The other voting systems used in Florida don't have the "hanging" or "dimpled" chad undervote problem prevalent with the Votomatic, resulting in Votomatic counties having a significantly higher undervote rate than non-Votomatic counties, possibly 30-40 times higher for “lost” Presidential votes.

Please see my spreadsheet analysis of the Florida vote for more details, available via the Internet at:

http://www.geocities.com/karl_kaufman/chadgate.xls

Compounding the voting system inequities in Florida is the fact that the ‘high error’ voting systems were more common in counties favoring the Gore/Lieberman Presidential ticket.  Vice President Gore received approximately 140,000 more votes in counties without error-checking, so the Gore vote was more affected by the error-checking equal protection violation.  Similarly, Gore/Lieberman held a 227,000 vote edge in Votomatic punch card counties (with a "chaddic cling" problem); so more Gore votes would have erroneously wound up in the undervote ballot pile.

The US Supreme Court declared that "equal protection" violations were unacceptable in stopping the manual vote counting in Florida, so the Florida electors must be challenged by any Congressperson wanting to inject equality back into the Presidential election.  At a minimum, the electors must be challenged in both the Senate and House in order to mark them historically.  In fact, the Senate should not only object to the electors, the Senate should reject them.  Due to the Republican majority in the House, the net effect will be that the electors will still be "accepted”, so there is NO LASTING HARM in objecting to the Florida electors.

Challenge of the electors in both the Senate and House is the only way to officially mark the electors historically, and to signal to the American people that the 2000 election irregularities have not been, and will not be, quickly forgotten or ignored.  It is imperative that the Senate and House take action on Saturday, January 06, 2001 to make the statement that Democracy in the United States is not dead.