“Bill Cotterell: Florida 2000 — Now that was an election”

Bush v. Gore reflections

Bill Cotterell column in the Tallahassee Democrat:

Cops, politicians and journalists sometimes use a cliche — “You can’t make this stuff up” — when they run into some novel or startling plot twists or game-changing surprises in events they’re describing.

It’s usually a bit of an exaggeration. But once, not long ago, Tallahassee was the center of a high-stakes legal drama, political struggle and media circus that defied description. And the weird thing was that everybody knew how it would end but couldn’t say so with any confidence.

A few blocks downhill from the towering state Capitol, where it all happened, Florida State University’s law school recently held a two-day conference about Bush vs. Gore. That was the case that captivated the nation for 36 days after the 2000 presidential election.

Of course, Republican George W. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore by 537 votes out of more than 6 million cast statewide — and won the presidency by locking up Florida’s 25 electoral votes.

Faculty Director of the Election Law Center, Professor Michael Morley, introduces the Panel Discussion Bush v. Gore, the Right to Vote, and Election Administration on Saturday morning during the Election Law Conference.

FSU’s 25th anniversary conference brought together many of the lawyers who argued for Gore and Bush from circuit courts to the nation’s highest tribunal. Also, it included state and county elections officers who labored with Florida’s haphazard voting systems, campaign consultants on both sides and many of the political junkies infesting Tallahassee. There was also a sprinkling of fresh-faced students who weren’t born when the presidency was decided by the men and women presenting orderly, scholarly panel discussions.

The dignified academic event focused on stuff like deadlines for legal filings, the official distinction between an election “challenge” and election “contest,” the criteria for determining voter intent when a ballot was not clearly marked and the certification of results. But such arcane details couldn’t capture the rollicking adventure of the time itself. 

Laws are made with the expectation that things work well. This election didn’t. …

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“Ohio AG Must Approve Qualified Immunity Measure Summary”

direct democracy

Bloomberg Law:

Ohio’s attorney general must approve a desired summary of a ballot measure that would make it easier to sue police and government officials, a federal judge ruled Friday.

The enforcement by Attorney General Dave Yost (R) enforcement of a law that says summaries of proposed constitutional amendments must be “fair and truthful” likely violated the Ohio Coalition to End Qualified Immunity’s free-speech rights, Senior Judge James L. Graham of the US District Court for the Southern District of Ohio said.

The judge’s preliminary injunction ordered Yost to immediately submit the disputed summary to the Ohio Ballot Board for review, the next step before the group can collect the signatures necessary to place its measure on this year’s ballot. The burdens imposed Yost’s enforcement of the law, which includes eight summary rejections, don’t justify the imposition on the group’s free-speech rights, Graham said.

“As applied, the Attorney General’s denials of plaintiffs’ summaries reached a level of hypercorrectness which went beyond ensuring that citizens could ascertain what they were being asked to support,” Graham wrote, adding that Yost “has played the role of an antagonistic copyeditor, striking plaintiffs’ work on technical grounds.”…

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“A still-unresolved North Carolina court election is back before judges next week”

judicial elections, recounts

AP:

A panel from North Carolina’s intermediate-level appeals court will hear arguments next week about a still-unsettled November election for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court.

The March 21 hearing by three judges on the Court of Appeals was announced Friday, the same day the court rejected a request by incumbent Supreme Court Associate Justice Allison Riggs to have the entire Court of Appeals consider the matter now instead.

After recounts and election protests, the registered Democrat Riggs leads Republican challenger Jefferson Griffin by 734 votes out of more than 5.5 million ballots cast in their race for an eight-year term on the highest court in the ninth-largest state.

While The Associated Press declared over 4,400 winners in the 2024 general election, the North Carolina Supreme Court election is the only race nationally that is still undecided.

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“Trump calls his opponents ‘scum’ and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department”

authoritarian threats in US, Department of Justice

Politico:

President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”

With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.

“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech, during a section when he was condemning both the people who directed the withdrawal from Afghanistan and those he falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election. “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”

In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies.

It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.

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