Citizens for Legitimate Government

Ballot lock box

ALL TRIAL LAWYERS KNOW this basic tenet: The evidence speaks for itself. But the five justices of the US Supreme Court who elevated George W. Bush to the presidency left the evidence locked in metal boxes.

It is said there is no appeal from a Supreme Court ruling because there is no higher legal authority. The people, however, are still sovereign. Individually and through their elected representatives, citizens will be watching this court. The goal must not be payback, but vigilance to discourage a repetition of such legal contortions.

Specifically, Justice John Paul Stevens was dead right in saying the biggest loser in Bush v. Gore was neither candidate, but the nation's confidence in the impartiality of judges. For this reason, none of the associate justices in the majority - Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, Anthony Kennedy, or Sandra Day O`Connor - should have any hope of ever succeeding William Rehnquist as chief justice.

Their legal contortions were essentially three.

The thought that recount standards should be the same from county to county may have some merit, but the idea of enforcing such a rule by Supreme Court edict is completely new and should not have been applied to this case.

More fundamentally, the core equal protection argument was completely off base. The basic inequality in the Florida election was between county mechanisms; persons in punch-card counties were five times as likely to have their votes ignored. Different counties used different recount methods to recapture some of those lost votes. Amazingly, the court said that, because one method may have recaptured half while another recaptured only a quarter, none of the votes could count.

All this the justices decided without so much as a look at the evidence in the case - the ballots themselves, scores of which, by any standard, showed a clear intent to vote.

And while there might still have been time to count statewide before the electoral votes are cast this coming Monday, the court prematurely punched the clock.

Under cover of a cynically applied equal protection argument, the majority declared that its five votes would count, while the thousands of ballots in locked metal boxes would not. This struck at the nation's democratic heart. Americans occasionally see news photos from overseas of ballot boxes surrounded by armed guards to prevent the votes from being counted - but only in the most totalitarian of regimes. Even in Serbia, they counted the votes.

Here, Rehnquist, Scalia, Thomas, Kennedy, and O'Connor have left democracy locked in metal boxes.

This story ran on page A18 of the Boston Globe on 12/16/2000.