Other shrill voices, led by Jesse Jackson, have been raised, claiming that blacks were "disenfranchised." Yet, in all these weeks, nobody took that claim to the courts, where they belonged, since racial disenfranchisement would be a violation of the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution of the United States. Instead, these inflammatory charges were taken to the media and Jesse Jackson is now threatening to take them to the streets.
Another reckless claim is that Florida Republicans were allowed to "tamper" with ballots or with ballot applications. Both the Democratic Party and the Republican Party handled absentee ballot applications for some of their respective members. The only difference was that the Republican Party failed to include identification numbers on these applications before submitting them to local election authorities. Realizing their omission, they then went down to the election offices and added these numbers.
This simple fact has been inflated into hysterical charges that election officials gave the Republicans a privilege denied to Democrats. But Democrats had no need to add numbers, since their numbers were already on the applications when they were submitted. Moreover, it is not "tampering" with an application to put something there that is supposed to be there. And this was just an application, not the ballot itself, which went out to the individual voters. Yet this trivial act was the basis of legal efforts by Gore allies to throw out the votes of 25,000 people, despite the Gore mantra that "every vote should be counted."
Former New York governor Mario Cuomo has even countenanced the idea that members of the electoral college who were elected to vote for Bush should betray the voters and vote for Gore.
The only consistency in all this is that the Gore camp has been out to win at all costs, despite losing recount after recount, and without regard to the harm done to the integrity of the process or the reputation of individuals or institutions.