While bending over backward to inflate the votes in places where Al Gore is favored, the courts are remarkably quiet about the disenfranchisement of military voters, who are expected to be voting for George W. Bush. We are told that without the magic postmark, overseas votes cannot be accepted. But the law does not say that. It says that such votes must be EITHER postmarked OR signed and dated by the voter.
Why are the vote-counters not going back through the military ballots to see how many of them are signed and dated, so that they can be counted without the postmark -- especially if "every vote counts"? Or must only every vote for Al Gore count?
Ironically, it is precisely the kinds of judicial activists who dominate the Florida Supreme Court who tell us that courts cannot follow the "original intent" of the Constitution of the United States because no one really knows what the intent of the founders was. Yet local partisan politicians are supposed to tell what the intent was behind dents in ballots.
But these are all dishonest word games. Judges who claim that they cannot tell the "original intent" of the Constitution -- or of legislation -- feel free to wing it with their own pet ideas of how society ought to work. But no one who advocates that the words of the law be followed means "original intent" in some psychological sense as the notions inside the heads of those who wrote the law.
No one voted on what thoughts were inside someone else's head. They voted on the accepted meaning of the words when they were written. Phrases like "due process" or "free speech" were already old legal terms in England before they were put into the American Constitution. There was no great mystery about what they meant.
They were a lot clearer than dents in a ballot.