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December 13, 2000 Text of Al Gore's Speech

Gore Beats Bush in the Numbers Again: 66.2 million people watched Gore concede in a nationally-televised address at 9 p.m. EST Wednesday, Nielsen Media Research said on Thursday, while one hour later, only 63.4 million viewers watched Bush. Nielsen's estimate measured the total audience for ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox, CNN, Fox News Channel and MSNBC.

Al Gore decided Wednesday to concede the country's overtime election, aides said, clearing the way for George W. Bush to become 43rd president and leader of a nation sharply divided along political lines.

After an excruciating daylong wait, Al Gore, his family and aides scrambled Tuesday night to sort through the U.S. Supreme Court's verdict and whether it spelled the end of his long battle to recount Florida's presidential vote.

The Supreme Court effectively handed the presidential election to George W. Bush tonight, overturning the Florida Supreme Court and ruling by a vote of 5 to 4 that there could be no further counting of Florida's disputed presidential votes.

A former Clinton White House counsel suggested Sunday that conservative Justice Antonin Scalia may want to recuse himself from the Florida recount case because his son works for a firm that represents George W. Bush.

Abandoning all pretense of unanimity, the U.S. Supreme Court's liberal and conservative members openly attacked each other yesterday over whether to stop the manual recounting of ballots in Florida.

Excerpts from a news conference yesterday in Tallahassee, Fla., held by David Boies and Ron Klain, lawyers for Vice President Al Gore, regarding the Supreme Court's decision to stop Florida recounts.

Excerpts from the Gore reply to an emergency motion filed Friday to the U.S. Supreme Court by the Bush campaign to halt the manual recounts in Florida.

The U.S. Supreme Court granted George W. Bush's request to stop ballot recounts in Florida on Saturday, and agreed to hear the Republican's appeal of a Florida court ruling that had resurrected the campaign of presidential rival Al Gore. Oral arguments will be at 11:00 a.m. Monday.

A divided Florida Supreme Court today breathed new life into Vice President Gore's presidential aspirations, ordering manual recounts of thousands of disputed ballots throughout the state. Ruling 4 to 3, the court also ordered state officials to certify 383 new votes for Gore that previously were rejected because they came from partial recounts of county returns.

For the second time in three days, the federal judiciary crafted a narrow ruling that avoided trampling on Florida courts while reserving the right to settle the disputed presidential election in the future.

Hoisting signs that said "This Is America -- Count Every Vote," about 2,000 demonstrators rallied today to support Vice President Al Gore's insistence on a recount of thousands of votes in Florida's presidential election.

After yesterday's rulings, Vice President Al Gore's lawyers face new obstacles in what was already an extremely difficult fight to win the White House through a court-ordered recount.

The United States Supreme Court avoided a definitive ruling in the Florida election case today by stepping back from the brink of disunity and asking the Florida Supreme Court to clarify the basis of its Nov. 21 ruling that permitted recounts to continue past a statutory deadline.

Read the text of the U.S. Supreme Court Opinion vacating and remanding Florida Supreme Court ruling on vote recounts

U.S. Justice Department investigators are in Florida to examine allegations that thousands of black voters were prevented or discouraged from casting ballots in the presidential election. The move comes days after national NAACP President Kweisi Mfume blasted the federal agency for what he sees as foot-dragging in the case, and ordered the organization's battery of attorneys to prepare a federal lawsuit.

Off 11/30 to 12/3

NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said several lawsuits would be filed as early as next week against the state government and election officials in counties including Broward, Miami-Dade and Hillsboro, seeking "injunctive relief" for minority voters who insist they were illegally turned away by sheriff's deputies, wrongly stricken from voter rolls or beset by other dubious barriers.

The Supreme Court, after rejecting a request to allow television coverage of Friday's arguments in the Florida election case, said Tuesday it would quickly make an audio tape available.

Off 11/22 - 11/27

George W. Bush's legal team filed a surprise brief with the Florida Supreme Court on Tuesday questioning the justices' authority in a crucial part of the historic presidential case they are considering. Al Gore's attorneys said it looked as if the Republicans were stalling and they filed an immediate response, urging the court to go ahead with its decision and to set standards on disputed manual vote recounts.

George W. Bush and Al Gore marshaled their legal forces Sunday for a climactic state Supreme Court showdown. The Gore team asked the court to set a generous standard for officials to ''ascertain the electorate's will'' when ballots were punched in the disputed presidential election. They said local election officials in close cases can ''determine the voter's intent'' by closely examining the ballot.

The Florida Supreme Court barred Florida's secretary of state from certifying official election results today but allowed the continued processing of overseas ballots and hand ballot recounts.

"On the limited evidence presented it appears that the Secretary has exercised her reasoned judgment to determine what relevant factors and criteria should be considered, applied them to the facts and circumstances pertinent to the individual counties involved and made her decision. My order requires nothing more."

The federal appeals court here began today to sort out another clamorous dispute from Florida, the question of whether to allow manual recounts of presidential ballots. With the manual recounts continuing and the Bush campaign suffering a setback today in the Florida Supreme Court, the decision here could be crucial. If the Bush campaign loses, its only recourse on the federal level would be the United States Supreme Court.

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris, the official presiding over her state's disputed presidential election, has turned to a law firm with ties to Gov. Jeb Bush for legal advice and is privately meeting with prominent Republicans....For Harris to stay in her job after 2002, the governor would have to appoint her, but in the past, she has mentioned her interest in running for the Senate.

Florida's high court gave the go-ahead to ballot recounts in the state's chaotic presidential election Thursday but left unanswered the question of whether the results will matter. [Ed.: Ruling Friday at 10:00 a.m. in state court on whether votes will count]

The NAACP gave the Justice Department on Thursday a transcript of complaints by black voters about the presidential election voting in south Florida.

Not every vote counts.George W. Bush and Al Gore are just 300 votes apart in Florida's presidential election, but more than 180,000 Floridians who went to the polls on Nov. 7 could have just stayed home. Their ballots were tossed out because they chose more than one presidential candidate, didn't choose one at all or their vote didn't register. According to an Associated Press survey of Florida's 67 county elections supervisors, the vote for a presidential candidate wasn't counted on 180,299 of the ballots.

''This case is simply not appropriate for federal court intervention of any kind at this point in the proceeding,'' Gore's lawyers argued in a brief filed Thursday morning with the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta.

Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris announced Wednesday night she would deny attempts by scattered counties to submit hand recounts of ballots to the results of the contested presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore.

Florida's highest court rejected the Republican secretary of state's requests Wednesday to delay any hand recounting of ballots in the chaotic tally of presidential ballots and to consolidate all lawsuits in one court in Tallahassee.

A federal appeals court in Atlanta agreed Wednesday to hear arguments on George W. Bush's attempt to shut down Democratic-prompted manual recounts in Florida's contested presidential election.

The Florida secretary of state announced tonight that she would comply with a state judge's order to consider results of further recounts in the disputed presidential election, but she gave the three Democratic counties that are still moving ahead with time-consuming hand recounts a deadline of 2 p.m. Wednesday to explain their reasons in writing.

Broward County officials reversed course Wednesday and granted a request by Al Gore's campaign for a full hand recount of 588,000 presidential election ballots. The county canvassing board voted 2-1 for the recount, which was to start later Wednesday and end by Monday. Republicans immediately asked a court to block the recount.

Text of Nov. 14 ruling by Leon County, Fla., Circuit Judge Terry P. Lewis on request by Volusia and Palm Beach counties to extend the 5 p.m. EST Nov. 14 deadline for reporting recounts of Florida's presidential vote to the secretary of state. Judge declined to extend deadline but directed secretary of state to use discretion and consider late filings.

The campaign of Texas Gov. George W. Bush filed notice Tuesday that it will ask an appeals court in Atlanta to order a stop to hand counting presidential election votes in Florida, a court official said. In a five-page notice, the Bush camp said it would ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn a decision rendered by a federal court in Miami Monday, according to court clerk Thomas Kahn.

Read the two conflicting sections of Florida's election law on deadlines for submitting certification of election results.

A Harvard-educated blueblood from one of Florida's wealthiest families, Secretary of State Katherine Harris is no stranger to controversy. She's been investigated for campaign finance violations and criticized for spending state money jetting around the world, spending up to $500 a night for hotel rooms in Washington. She's also been one of George W. Bush's most prominent political supporters, campaigning for him in Florida and elsewhere.

Fox News Channel is investigating whether an executive related to George W. Bush provided his cousin's campaign with insider exit poll data on Election Night.

A federal judge's ruling today allowed hand recounts in several Florida counties to go forward, but it is unlikely that the current hand count under way will be done by an imposed deadline of Tuesday afternoon. Meanwhile, Al Gore's presidential campaign joined in Florida state court actions brought by some counties today, seeking additional time for the hand counting of thousands of ballots beyond the Tuesday deadline imposed by the state's top elections official. [Ed: Ruling expected sometime Tuesday morning]

Text of U.S. District Court Judge Donald M. Middlebrook's opinion denying Gov. George W. Bush's request for an injunction to halt hand counting of ballots.

Democrats argue George W. Bush's legal effort to block a manual recount in four Florida counties is not a matter for the federal courts and note that the tradition of counting by hand started with the nation's founding. The motion for an injunction should be denied because the Bush campaign has not been able to ''justify the extraordinary interference with state electoral processes they seek,'' the legal response said.

Read the motion for preliminary injunction filed by George W. Bush to stop the hand re-count in Palm Beach County. Hearing will be held at 9:30 Monday morning.

Democrats argue George W. Bush's legal effort to block a manual recount in four Florida counties is not a matter for the federal courts and note that the tradition of counting by hand started with the nation's founding. The motion for an injunction should be denied because the Bush campaign has not been able to ''justify the extraordinary interference with state electoral processes they seek,'' the legal response said.

Read the motion for preliminary injunction filed by George W. Bush to stop the hand re-count in Palm Beach County. Hearing will be held at 9:30 Monday morning.

Palm Beach County election officials awarded three dozen additional votes to Al Gore following a mechanical recount and then decided that all 425,000 votes cast last week should be counted by hand.

Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks, appointed to the bench four years ago by President Clinton, is a longtime Democrat. Respected for his intellect and compassion, Middlebrooks, 53, led the push for Florida’s Sunshine Laws, designed to make government more accountable and accessible to the public. Middlebrooks’ first controversial battle came more than 20 years ago when he helped free famed Death Row inmates Freddie Pitts and Wilbert Lee. “He’s a very impressive fellow and an excellent judge, but he’s the worst possible judge the Bush campaign could have drawn for this case,” said Nova University Professor Bob Jarvis, who specializes in state constitutional law.

The Republican decision to sue Florida election officials in federal court appears to be a strategic move to avoid state circuit courts and their elected judges, while also dodging the state Supreme Court now dominated by Democratic appointees, legal experts said. But the plan might be doomed from the start. The legal arguments they use to try to stop the manual recount of presidential ballots don’t meet the strict standards for gaining an injunction, the legal experts said.

It was chad vs sunlight Saturday, and the chad won. During the manual count of votes in Palm Beach County, Fla., officials switched tests mid-count to decide the validity of the ballots.

George W. Bush's campaign went to federal court in Florida on Saturday, determined to block Democratic requests for hand recounts of votes of portions of the state that holds the key to the 2000 presidential election. [Ed. A hearing is set for 9:30 a.m. Monday]

Robert Rackleff, a Leon County commissioner and a member of that county's canvassing board, maintains that punch card systems are eight times more likely to miss a vote than optical scanners used elsewhere. Peter Neumann, principal scientist at SRI International, a nonprofit computer research group, who has testified before Congress on computer issues, says officials in England and Germany consider manual counts to be more accurate than automated ones. "You should do a manual recount of every card in the state," Neumann said.

Americans by a 3-to-1 margin say it's more important to make certain the vote count in Florida has been fair and accurate than to resolve matters quickly, polls show.

Americans will take to the streets all over the country Saturday in a show of outrage over possible ballot irregularities in Florida that could, they feel, keep Al Gore from becoming president. A grass-roots effort promoted online lists the locations of the protests, ranging from the Civic Plaza in Albuquerque, N.M., to the Federal Building in Baltimore, Md., to New York’s Times Square and downtown Madison, Wis.

A Palm Beach County judge issued a temporary injunction late Thursday that prohibits the county elections office from certifying its recount of presidential votes until a hearing is held Tuesday on a lawsuit over the ballot's design.

Vice President Al Gore narrowly defeated George W. Bush for Oregon's seven electoral votes in a bittersweet victory three days after the election. The margin is so close that a recount cannot be precluded.

With the race between Gore and George W. Bush hinging on a few hundred Florida votes, advocacy groups contended that the outcome was skewed by the disenfranchisement of more than 500,000 ex-offenders. Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project, two of the groups raising the issue, estimated that 31 percent of the black men in Florida -- more than 200,000 potential voters -- were excluded from the polls because they were in prison or had criminal records.

Taking an election to court is easier in Florida than in many other states....Florida law lays out five grounds for challenging elections: an ineligible candidate, fraud, bribery, illegal votes and frustration of the voters' will.

Dec. 18, the day that presidential electors are to meet in 50 state capitals and the District of Columbia, may produce a political crisis if Florida's 25 votes are still in dispute. But the crisis will not be constitutional, scholars say, for the Constitution enables a president to be chosen even if a big state like Florida does not vote.

George W. Bush's lead over Al Gore in crucial Florida shrank to fewer than 400 votes by unofficial count Thursday with allegations of irregularities swirling and ballots from overseas residents still to be counted. Recount results from 65 of the state's 67 counties gave Republican Bush a lead of 225 votes out of nearly 6 million cast, according to an unofficial tally by The Associated Press. The original ''final'' margin had been reported at 1,784.

The 538 members of the electoral college still have to cast their ballots on Dec. 18, and the new Congress, sitting in joint session on Jan. 6, will have to count them. And while it is almost certain that the members of the electoral college will indeed, vote for the candidates to whom they have pledged support, it is not absolutely certain. Only the thinnest legal barriers prevent a "faithless elector" from voting for someone other than the candidate who won the popular vote in his or her state.

Thousands of Florida residents were struck from the voter lists because they were mistakenly identified as ex-felons, just months before what has become the closest election in US history. With Bush apparently leading Gore by only hundreds of votes, in a state with hundreds of thousands of disenfranchised voters, could similar errors be tipping the race?

Three people filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking a new election in Palm Beach County, claiming the punch-card ballot was so confusing that they accidentally voted for Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan instead of Vice President Al Gore.View the actual ballot and decide for yourselves.

Hillary Rodham Clinton stepped from the White House to the United States Senate tonight, becoming the first presidential spouse to be elected to public office. Mrs. Clinton defeated Representative Rick A. Lazio to succeed retiring Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a Democrat.

George W. Bush's arrest for drunken driving in 1976 cost him some votes, exit polls suggest. More than a fourth of voters said news of Bush's arrest for driving under the influence was somewhat or very important to their vote. They were about four times more likely to vote for Gore.

President-elect Bush nominated defeated Missouri Sen. John Ashcroft to be attorney general on Friday, choosing a conservative Republican who lost his re-election bid to a dead man.

Spare me. If ever there was a time to question the legitimacy of an incoming administration, it is now.... What occurred is that a presidential election was stolen, first on the ground in Florida and then for good measure by a partisan Supreme Court whose right-wing majority cared more about its own retirement schedule than about the institution itself. If Bush wants to demonstrate real bipartisan leadership, he should begin by backing a constitutional amendment to assure that no successor can ever repeat this theft.

When Al Gore was in Vietnam he never saw much combat. Throughout his presidential campaign, though, he insisted he wanted to "fight" for every American. Well, Wednesday night, in his concession speech, Mr. Gore took a bullet for the country. The shot was fired at the heart of the nation by the five conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, with their politically inspired ruling that installed George W. Bush as president.

CHIEF JUSTICE REHNQUIST. We're dropping in the polls on the question of our fairness, but we still need to anoint Bush president. It's best for us. We'll just have to work harder to hide the truth: that we are driven by all the same petty human emotions as everybody else in this town — ambition, partisanship, political debts and revenge.

Investigations and lawsuits will eventually establish just how many black votes were suppressed or stolen. But it's already clear that the number easily exceeds Bush's current lead in Florida. We've been hearing a lot of media blather lately about the importance of bipartisanship and unity. Instead, the pundits should be investigating this theft. If Bush does take the oath of office January 20, he will take office as a fraud. And if he preaches bipartisan or racial healing, he is an even bigger fraud.

If the Republicans succeed in once again killing the manual count through their U.S. Supreme Court appeal, George W. Bush's victory will stand as a low point in the annals of American democracy

Blood is More Important Than Talent at the Court of George....Most of the reasons that this second Bush presidency appears either sinister or ridiculous result from its dynastic stucture. The essential problem with monarchy is that it puts power at the mercy of relatives and genetics. And this is precisely what hobbles the putative new Bush administration. Let's begin with the question of Jeb.

The U.S. Supreme Court is wrong to stop the counting in Florida -- its order denies Americans information they have a right to know before Congress picks the president in January.

A precinct-by-precinct analysis conducted by the Miami Herald concluded just that, saying that in a less error-prone election Florida likely would have gone to Mr. Gore by up to 23,000 votes. No cost is too great to make sure that every vote counts and that every vote gets counted. As this presidential election has shown, a vote can be a terrible thing to waste.

Blacks turned out to vote in record numbers in Florida this year, but huge numbers were systematically turned away for one specious reason after another. The tactics have changed, but the goal remains the same.

As the Supreme Court acts as tourniquet to stop the flow of democracy and as a crusty circuit court judge slams into pulp the fingers that would actually count the ballots, evidence continues to emerge that George W. Bush will become president with voter blood left on the floor. On the strictest or most cowardly notions of ''no credible statistical evidence,'' the courts are blessing the ramrodding of this election by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris. The blessings come despite even more evidence in the past week that black votes are being left on the floor.

We might ask ourselves what we are doing in the United States, and what grave decisions we will allow to stand on the basis of flimsy eyewitness identification. In The Hague, where no defendant fears execution, the case is built very slowly through a steady accretion of detail, witness by witness by witness. What is going on in Texas, where one woman who can say she saw a man for seconds in 1981 is enough to send him to his death?

WHOEVER WINS the presidency will also inherit the Clinton administration's risky commitment to finance the so-called drug war in Colombia. With the passage last June of a $1.3 billion aid package -- most of which is military assistance -- President Clinton and Congress set the stage for American troops and helicopters to intervene in a civil war that has raged for nearly 40 years. The United States' intervention in Colombia has still not appeared on this country's political radar. It has the potential to turn into America's next military nightmare.

What's at stake in Florida is nothing less than the right to vote and to have it count. And once again an angry, elitist GOP is on the wrong side.

The election turmoil has yet to produce a legitimate president, but it has provided the nation with valuable civics lessons and illuminated many dark corners of our electoral infrastructure. It also has reminded us of the continuing importance of race in our national consciousness.

American voters split down the middle in picking a president this year. But on drug policy, a clear majority is emerging: Americans want to get smart on drugs.

The impeachment and removal of federal judges who issue rulings that are objectionable to some conservatives has been very seriously proposed by Representative Tom DeLay, one of the most powerful members of Congress, and other right-wing extremists in the Republican Party. Most Americans are unaware of these bizarre and dangerous proposals.

At this very moment Bush supporters in the Florida Legislature are polishing up a plan to meet in special session and choose the state's electors themselves, overriding the people's vote if it turns out to be for Vice President Gore. That would be ex post facto with a vengeance.

Every voter in Voter-ville liked democracy a lot, but the Republicans in Florida assuredly did NOT!

With his legal options narrowing and Gov. George W. Bush moving aggressively to claim the presidency, Vice President Al Gore last night essentially asked the American people to give him time to challenge the official vote count in Florida. As a matter of law and fairness, he deserves that right....The nation will be best served if all the votes that were cast in that state are counted and the winner enters the White House with as definitive a victory as is possible in these difficult circumstances.

The results of the presidential vote may be ambiguous, but one clear result of the Nov. 7 election was the electorate's fading allegiance to the nation's war on drugs. There were drug-policy issues on the ballots of seven states during this election cycle, and in five of those states voters chose anti-war policies.

Although the Bush campaign's stand on military ballots was proper, its renewed rhetorical assault aimed at depicting the hand recounts as a form of vote theft is irresponsible. The recounts, which should be allowed by the Florida Supreme Court, still represent the best way to settle the vote there.

The unanimous ruling by the Florida Supreme Court to allow the hand counting of votes to resume in Palm Beach County brought a note of order and reason to the last act of the presidential election....The state and federal judiciary cannot tolerate [Ms. Harris'] defiance...Today, Judge Lewis must take away Ms. Harris's powers to bring the election to Gov. George W. Bush, for whom she worked as a state campaign co-chairwoman.

Mr. Gore has now responded creatively to the situation while Mr. Bush emerged form the seclusion of his ranch only to turn down a real opportunity to negotiate a procedural agreement that the public would trust.

The situation could hardly be more transparent. The Republican Party is consumed with the fear that somehow a fair count of the votes in Florida will be permitted. It is doing all it can to prevent that from happening.

If Bush has an ounce of the compassion he says he does, he will recite the Voting Rights Act backward as well as forward and let the votes be counted until all the t's are dotted and the i's crossed. If he does not, he will be remembered as the president who won on the underlying principle of eliminating thousands of Americans from the voting booth.

I HATE to interrupt all this fabulous election fun for business, but they're going to execute Johnny Penry on Thursday. I guess you could say that's a small loss to the world. John Paul Penry never did have much luck, and then he committed a horrible crime. The trouble is, Penry has an IQ of 56 as tested by the University of Texas at Austin, which is considered retarded. Somebody should be held responsible for this tragedy, but it's not the man with the IQ of a small child sitting in a cell with his coloring books. The 18 members of the state Board of Pardons and Paroles, and Gov. Bush could spare his life. This is Bush's chance to show that he's made of better stuff and is indeed a ``compassionate'' conservative.

The question before the nation regarding the counting of votes in Florida is actually simple. It is whether the next president should be determined by the most accurate counting of the ballots in that state. By announcing that all of Florida's 67 counties must certify and report their vote totals no later than 5 p.m. today, whether or not the manual counting of ballots has been completed, Katherine Harris, Florida's secretary of state, has made a hasty and partisan judgment. The Florida courts should extend the deadline, as several counties and the Gore camp requested in state court yesterday.

Mr. Bush's move to stop the manual vote counting in four heavily Democratic counties in Florida was wrongly conceived. The argument of James A. Baker III that hand counting is an error- prone attempt to "divine" voter intentions is mistaken....During the campaign, Mr. Bush tirelessly repeated his belief that states should be allowed to determine what is best for them. It is disingenuous for him to challenge the constitutionality of a law similar to one his own state adopted.

The butterfly ballot mess in Palm Beach County has been widely reported. But there are also complaints that thousands of other properly registered Floridians, many of them black, were improperly prevented from voting. This has not gotten a lot of attention. If you have large numbers of voters complaining that they were denied access to the polls, and you combine that with the fact that the Bush campaign is doing all it can to prevent a complete count of those who did vote, it's very difficult to imagine a way in which a full and fair result can be arrived at in a couple of weeks.

The question is which 25 electors the Florida voters chose. We may never know the answer. No judicially ordered rerun of the election could perfectly replicate the conditions of this past Election Day. But it could come close. A corrective election could be limited to people who voted the first time around, and those voting could be required to submit sworn affidavits that they will vote for whichever candidate they had intended to vote for on Election Day.

Bush is the loser; Gore is the winner. Any other outcome will be a violation of the popular will, a disgrace on the United States, and a disaster for the wider cause of liberty. If Dubya steals the White House, American democracy will be a joke.

This week, with the future of the free world up for grabs, it is once again clear that Florida — America's sunny Margaritaville of drifters, grifters and politically active lap-dancers — has something of a credibility problem when it comes to the heavy lifting of democracy. Think about it: hundreds of liberal Jews in Palm Beach, some of them elderly retirees, mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan, a candidate they revile for both his politics and his comments about Hitler, and this costs Al Gore, a candidate they adore for picking a Jewish running mate, four years in the White House? Not even Carl Hiaasen is this good.

Mandating the use of ineffective software in public schools and libraries is, on its face, absurd. It is also very likely unconstitutional.

There is no reason for Mr. Gore to concede at this point. On the facts, he has a fair claim that he was the actual choice of more voters in Florida than Governor Bush.

Not many elections are conducted on ballots that are not merely confusing but illegal. That is what happened in Palm Beach County, Fla. And that is why the election there, in every precinct that was supplied an illegal ballot, must be rerun. It is not a matter of political will. It is the law.

The truth is that one question and one question only should be dominating our political debate that this crucial moment in American history: Will the nation — and the news media — let the Republicans steal this presidential election?

I so totally hope that Al Gore decides to fight like a junkyard dog for Florida's 25 electoral votes. It is necessary that he fight for Florida as the voice of those who have no voice otherwise -- the millions of voters who chose to believe in the promise of a Gore presidency.

Tuesday's election is a pivotal contest in the land of the free and home of the brave. If Texas Gov. George W. Bush defeats Vice President Al Gore, the stage will be set for a three-branch governmental assault on the very idea of progressive public policy. With a Bush presidency, a GOP Congress and a Supreme Court full of Republican appointees, rulings like Roe vs. Wade, policies like affirmative action and concepts like social justice are likely to become relics of a bygone era. A vote for Gore is the only way to prevent this horrid possibility, though I believe Ralph Nader is the best candidate.

Questions I'd Like to Ask George Bush ...by George Castelle, Esq.

How would Presidential candidate George Bush, Jr. fare under an experienced criminal defense lawyer's cross-examination about possible past cocaine usage?

Sung to the tune of "What a Wonderful World" by Sam Cooke

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