Keith Devens .com

as opposed to opening up the election to the crap that happened last time in Florida?

So that's it... let's just cancel all elections until we're all using the exact same perfectly reliable voting systems. That makes perfect sense.

But that's not even the point. The point is that the voting systems used are always up to the states to decide, even for national elections whose effects obviously go beyond any particular state. This is a case of a federal appeals court illegally intervening into a state's procedures for purely political reasons.

In addition, I think you misunderstand what happened in Florida, 2000. The main problem was the "butterfly ballots". People supposedly didn't understand them, even though they were mailed a sample ballot with plenty of time prior to the election, and supposedly they were "unfair" to the Democratic side, even though they were approved by Democrats on the voting committee. So then Gore sued to try to get "recounts" only in Democratic counties. I say "recounts" because rather than just counting the votes again, the "recounts" involved mutating and subjective metrics to try to divine the intentions of the voters in cases where the votes were otherwise invalid. So the Supreme Court had to step in to stop the shenanigans, which were illegal under Florida law. The Florida court ignored the Supreme Court the first time they commanded them to stop the illegal "recounts", but they finally capitulated the second time the Supreme Court demanded they stop.

So rather than this action of the 9th Circus court preventing a situation like what occurred in Florida, 2000, it's instead sadly reminiscent of what happened in Florida, 2000: A liberal judiciary is trying to illegally shift the scales in favor of a Democratic candidate, in this case actually illegally postponing an election the request of the ACLU, against the will of the voters of California, and at odds with the constitution of California.