Gore did not carry Tennessee because Rove especially targeted Tennessee for a win simply to embarrass Gore. The margin by which Bush* carried Tennessee was not all that great, I think it was about 40,000 (just something like that). But what a lot of people never really realized was that Tennessee was riddled with the same type of voting "irregularities" that waffled through Florida. It was in fact for voter suppression "a little Florida." I only am aware of this because my family is from Tennessee and I read about a number of the shyster tricks Republicans played down there. Eventually, some of these complaints were investigated by the government and settled, just as those in Florida were. Long, long voting lines at polling places where African-Americans were in the majority, reduced number of places to cast ballots, people turned away because they didn't have required id, polls closing while long lines where still in place and subsequent court complaints -- you name it, and it happened.

Gore did not push for a full recount because that was not an option presented in the State constitution. The only way to obtain a full state recount was by court order (which eventually came down the Florida Supreme Court) or by permission of the Governor (and we remember who the Governor of Florida was at that time). The Florida Supreme Court should have had the last word on this election dispute as the rules for conducting Presidential elections are defined in our U.S. Constitution. The U.S. Supreme Court had no, I repeat no, Constitutional authority to intervene as long as the State of Florida conducted the election according to election laws previously written into the Constitution (which Gore was following and the Republicans were not).

And once the U.S. Supreme Court usurped the matter, the two laws it used to justify stopping the recount were nothing but bullsh*t. That Safe Harbor law (the one setting the deadline for when the slate of electors had to be submitted to the Elector College) was originally written when states forwarded their slates to the electors BY PONY EXPRESS. So the law was written to mandate the couriers be dispatched in a timely manner by the riders on horseback. There was plenty of time for that recount to have been conducted and the slate sent to the Electoral College. Secondly, that equal protection law stating that the voters whose votes might be recaptured in a recount would carry more weight than the votes of the original voters that were counted, and thus the original voters would be discriminated against should a recount change the result of the election. And in that latter statement, the Supreme Court negated the 5 million popular vote advantage Al Gore had over Bush* nationwide. So if one is to give any nod of agreement to the Supreme Court's falling back on that asinine equal protection plank, how does that same person justify the nullification of the 5 million votes on a national basis that rationale generated.

Sorry for the length of this post, but this is one subject that always pushes my buttons....

Sam