For the record, and to clear up possible conflicts of interest, I voted for Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate for president. I think that both major parties are full of shit, and just part of the Permanent Corporate Government that Ralph Nader complains about.

Today, the GOP were out in force, complaining about the Democrats’ continued attempts to get the ballots in Florida recounted. They are bringing out their old complaint that Clinton and Gore are eeevil, and that they (note that they include Clinton in this) are trying to steal the election, etc.

It seems pretty clear to me that the majority of the people in Florida voted for or meant to vote for Al Gore. Some of them were just too dumb to not vote for Pat Buchanan instead, and some of them were too dumb to actually punch their little punchy thing all the way through the ballot.

And so the Democrats are attempting to get those marginal ballots counted, to make sure that all the votes for Gore, even the ones (barely) cast by idiots, are counted.

Bush happens to be in the lead right now, though, and so the Republicans are attempting to keep those ballots from being counted, claiming that attempting to divine the intention of a voter — which Florida law doesn’t require but which it also doesn’t prohibit — is in some way sinister.

Never mind that Texas’ election law — a law that George W. Bush signed — specifies that this is precisely what the election officials are supposed to do in a close recount.

At the moment, though, Bush is still in the lead, which means that he and his henchmen will do anything they can to keep those votes from being counted. ( But mind you, I’m sure that, were the positions reversed, the Dems would be doing the same thing.)

And that’s what’s sick. If they’re confident that they’ve won fairly, they should submit — or even call for — a recount of the entire state, to determine what the people’s decision really was, rather than trying to speed the state into declaring a winner based on incomplete counts.