General Discussion

Having spent 15 years living in one of the disputed counties and volunteering on election campaigns, everything from local state legislative campaigns all the way to Presidential campaigns when I lived in Florida, I know Florida election law quite well because I personally worked under it. Florida's intent of the voter standard in 2000 required that all votes where the intent of the voter is clear be counted. Voters can mark their ballots in ways that the counting machines are unable to read them but they make clear the candidate they voted for. Florida had a remedy for counting such ballots in order to make sure that every vote is counted as Florida law clearly required. Votes that the counting machines couldn't read were allowed to be hand duplicated and then they were counted. The county election supervisors were required by law to keep detailed records of every vote that was counted in this manner. This is how 10,000 absentee ballots that the counting machines couldn't read that were located in the most heavily republican voting counties in Florida were in fact hand duplicated and counted. They favored W by more than 2 to 1 and they're in the Jeb Bush/Katherine Harris fraudulent vote total. These absentee ballots were hand duplicated and counted at the very same time W was claiming publicly that he opposed hand counting ballots. W would not have been able to steal the election without these hand counted ballots. The Bush campaign made no effort to block the hand duplication and counting of these ballots because they so heavily favored W. They just blocked the counting of the ballots that the counting machines couldn't read that were in the largest and most heavily democratic voting counties in Florida because they knew that counting all of the votes meant victory for Al Gore. The truth is, the ability to hand duplicate and count ballots that the counting machines couldn't read applied to all ballots that the counting machines couldn't read and not a select few absentee ballots in Florida's most heavily republican voting counties .The Bush election stealers refused to follow Florida election law and count all of the votes because they knew W would lose. When Florida's intent of the voter standard is followed and all of the uncounted Florida ballots where the intent of the voter is clear are counted, W loses every time.
It's also important to remember that the election laws that were in place in Florida in 2000 had been on the books for a century. They were passed in the aftermath of the 1876 election that the GOP had stolen under very similar circumstances. In 1876, the GOP controlled canvassing board in Florida threw out the votes of 1,800 democrats simply because they could because there was no requirement to count every vote. This changed the outcome of that election and awarded Florida to the GOP. This is very similar to what happened in 2000. It had wrongly been believed that the Florida requirement that all votes where the intent of the voter is clear be counted would be enough to make sure that all of the votes were in fact counted in 2000 and it wasn't because the corrupt Florida GOP Governor Jeb, W's brother and corrupt Florida Secretary of State and Bush/Florida campaign co-chair Katherine Harris refused to count all of the votes, Florida election law be damned and got 5 corrupt GOP SCOTUS judges to rubberstamp their anti-democracy behavior.