scholarly journals Ballot Ontology

Non-Being ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 139-164
Author(s):  
Roberto Casati ◽  
Achille C. Varzi

The US Presidential Election of 2000 was crucially decided in Florida. And, in Florida, the election might have been decided crucially by the question: is a dimple a hole? “Yes, it is”, so dimpled ballots are valid and ought to be counted. “No it isn’t”, and dimpled ballots must be rejected as invalid. If only one knew the answer! Where were the hole experts when we needed them? Eventually the manual recount was stopped by the Supreme Court. But we did learn something. We learned that even the destiny of a Presidential Election, if not more, might ultimately depend on one’s criteria for identifying holes—not their material surroundings, which everyone could detect, but the holes themselves.

2003 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 535-556 ◽  
Author(s):  
JAMES L. GIBSON ◽  
GREGORY A. CALDEIRA ◽  
LESTER KENYATTA SPENCE

The conventional wisdom about the US Supreme Court and the 2000 presidential election is that the Court wounded itself by participating in such a partisan dispute. By ‘wounded’ people mean that the institution lost some of its legitimacy. Evidence from our survey, conducted in early 2001, suggests little if any diminution of the Court’s legitimacy in the aftermath of Bush v. Gore, even among African Americans. We observe a relationship between evaluations of the opinion and institutional legitimacy, but the bulk of the causality seems to flow from loyalty to evaluations of the case, not vice versa. We argue that legitimacy frames perceptions of the Court opinion. Furthermore, increased awareness of the activities of the Court tends to reinforce legitimacy by exposing people to the powerful symbols of law. In 2000, legitimacy did indeed seem to provide a reservoir of good will that allowed the Court to weather the storm created by its involvement in Florida’s presidential election.


Author(s):  
Justin Grimmer

This paper continues an analysis, begun in the December 2004 issue, that employed panel data to estimate the effects of awareness and political partisanship on post-convention candidate evaluations. The derivation of a theoretical framework was discussed in Part 1 [1]. Empirical results using data from the US presidential election of 2000 are discussed in the present article. We find that partisans of the opposite party were more resistant to the convention message of Bush than Gore, that awareness played a greater role in determining a predicted post-convention change for Gore, and that Gore’s message was received and accepted at a higher rate than Bush’s message.


Author(s):  
Christoph Bezemek

This chapter assesses public insult, looking at the closely related question of ‘fighting words’ and the Supreme Court of the United States’ decision in Chaplinsky v New Hampshire. While Chaplinsky’s ‘fighting words’ exception has withered in the United States, it had found a home in Europe where insult laws are widely accepted both by the European Court of Human Rights and in domestic jurisdictions. However, the approach of the European Court is structurally different, turning not on a narrowly defined categorical exception but upon case-by-case proportionality analysis of a kind that the US Supreme Court would eschew. Considering the question of insult to public officials, the chapter focuses again on structural differences in doctrine. Expanding the focus to include the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (ACtHPR), it shows that each proceeds on a rather different conception of ‘public figure’.


2018 ◽  
Vol 68 ◽  
pp. 529-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keshab Bhattarai ◽  
Paul Bachman ◽  
Frank Conte ◽  
Jonathan Haughton ◽  
Michael Head ◽  
...  

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