Students tired of election delays

Graduate student Fedor Fomenko said he is frustrated with the continuing election drama. He said he believes in the system, but he feels both candidates have dragged the election out for too long.\n"Democracy is the best form of government," Fomenko said. "Unfortunately it does not work all the time."\nAlthough Texas Gov. George Bush was certified as the winner of Florida's electoral votes in the official recount, the election is not over. But the events of the past couple of weeks have already worn on election watchers.\nFlorida Secretary of State Katherine Harris certified the recount Sunday with many questions remaining about the counts in Miami-Dade, Nassau and Palm Beach counties. Harris is also the co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida.\n"She did exactly what you expected her to do," said political science professor Gerald Wright. "She was following the Supreme Court ruling and did what the Bush people wanted."\nJunior and Legal Studies Club vice president Justin Furr believes the courts are not the place where the election should be decided.\n"It is an election of the people," he said. "Judges should not decide what the people want."\nMost students seem to be tired of the whole ordeal.\n"It is time for it to be over," senior Robert Ridlon said. "They have declared a winner four times already, there is not much of a battle left."\nBut Gore representatives said they wanted the 10,000 dimpled-chad ballots from Miami-Dade County to be counted to make the recount fair. They also filed a lawsuit challenging the legality of the butterfly ballot.\n"It's not over until the votes have been counted," Gore attorney David Boies told CNN. "You have 9,000 or 10,000 votes that have never been counted once." \nBush has a lawsuit pending in the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and another one before the U.S. Supreme Court that could end recounts.\n"I would like to see a good-faith effort to include every vote they possibly can," Wright said.\nBush is forging on with preparing a transition team, already having named Republican vice presidential nominee Dick Cheney head of the transition team and trying to petition the government to allocate funds for their transition into office. Officials have refused on the grounds that the winner has not been officially declared.\nWright said he thinks Bush is using his lead as a public relations tool to build up support for cessation of the process.\nGore's Public Relations technique is slightly different, Wright said. Gore and Connecticut Sen. Joseph Lieberman have repeatedly stressed the importance of every vote cast in the election, including the absentee ballots. But a democratic activist filed a suit that seeks to throw out 15,000 absentee ballots on the account that 4,700 ballots did not have a voter identification number.\nFurr voted absentee in this election, and he said he would be furious if someone threw out his valid ballot on account of a few invalid ballots.\nWright, on the other hand, said the legal games is part of politics.\n"Law is a part of the political process," Wright said.