At 11:04 AM 11/29/00 -0800, Steve Schear wrote a message that was in some HTML format that Eudora badly choked over when trying to reply. It was possible to save it with all the random font change garbage and funny characters, but not to just send a text reply.

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1. Imagine that we read of an election occurring anywhere in the third world in which the self-declared winner was the son of the former prime minister and that former prime minister was himself the former head of that nation's secret police (CIA).

Steve, or whoever The Blue Writer is, says "Correction. He was declared the winner by the fact that he has received 271 of the needed 270 electoral votes." Bush hasn't received them. Not only have the Electors not voted yet, but Florida hasn't selected their electors yet. They're still haggling about whether the votes should all be counted, and the Republicans have done a good job of preventing any recounts from being finished (or used), to the extent of organizing riots outside the Miami/Dade election office. They're also trying to decide what to do about the 19000 double-punch ballots (probably unfixable), and the 15000 absentee ballot applications that were allegedly criminally altered by the Republicans (10000 were voted for Bush, 5000 for Gore). Then there were the 12000 mainly black voters whose registrations were disqualified incorrectly because they were allegedly felons, based on a database provided by a company whose parent company gave a six-figure contribution to the Republican Party - about 8000 of those people got back on the voter rolls, and probably not all of the other 4000 would have voted, but they were much more likely to have voted Democrat. I'm not saying the double-punched ballots were Republican fraud; it looks a lot more like Democrat incompetence in the ballot design, though it's been suggested that they could also have been from Democrat attempts at fraud (punch a spike through the Gore hole, and it won't invalidate any ballots already marked for Gore, but will invalidate any ballots voting for other candidates.) The "bunch of elementary school kids had no trouble" press release is fun, but bogus. If the teacher had told the kids "Vote for Gore and Lieberman" instead of "Vote for Gore", they'd have been much more likely to make a mistake. Thanks! Bill Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639