WATCHING the recent week's electoral morass on CNN in the same fascinated, near-amazed way workers at a sausage factory stare at their machines, I came to a conclusion on Sunday morning. Al Gore will be the next president of the United States. Given the events that have transpired, a Gore victory in Florida is currently inevitable. It is also a travesty. Through the use of the most partisan electoral methods since the Daley family in Chicago, Gore has stolen this election.
For those not paying attention, the actual process of Election Day happened on November 7th. Despite the fact that the networks incorrectly called Florida for Gore while polls were still open within the state, Bush squeaked out a victory. Due to Bush's small margin of victory, a mandatory recount ensued, and Bush's margin of victory narrowed to around 300 votes.
However, assuming most people understand the greater-than-less-than rules from elementary school - the alligator always eats the larger number, if that helps - Bush still won Florida. Bush should be the president. However, things would not be so easy.
Prior to the recount, chaos, in the form of angry, affluent, and apparently less-than-scholarly persons with a lot of time on their hands, began to appear. The chaos, urged on by Democratic operatives, Gore operatives and Democratic special interest groups, appeared frequently on television.
The upset voters focused on a supposedly defective ballot that appeared in a number of highly-Democratic precincts. Allegedly, this ballot caused 19,000 voters not to vote for their real choice, presumably Gore. The ballot, a butterfly design, was the same one used in 1996. Both political parties designed the thing, and it appeared in newspapers prior to the election. Conveniently, no one complained about its design until after the election.
Its design had a series of potential holes - called chads - running down the middle of the ballot. To the left and right of the chads, candidates' names appeared. Each candidate had a number attached to his name, and that number corresponded with a particular chad. Additionally, each candidate had an arrow pointing from his name directly to the corresponding chad. In short, one would have to qualify as a uniquely gifted moron to mark this ballot incorrectly. Sadly, 19,000 voters qualified as such.
This led the four most Democratic counties in Florida, acting like a Salvation Army for the voting impaired, to use a hand count to divine for the third time what voters really thought.
At this point in the process, the election went from being a somewhat flawed, non-partisan process, to being a horrifically flawed, subjective and partisan process. As one might expect, the election boards in the Democratic counties have Democrats sitting in rather prominent positions. Provided the state's voting machines interpreted ballots in an objective fashion, the partisanship of the local boards largely didn't matter. They could only report what a machine read as the vote count. However, the relevance of the party changes, as one moves into the realm of the hand count.
Unlike Texas, which also has a hand count option, Florida law does not set out an objective standard for local electoral boards to follow when rechecking ballots. This means that any board can decide that any particular indention, perforation or piece of dust may suffice to indicate that someone "really" wanted to vote for a particular candidate. In Palm Beach County, the electoral board changed its mind as to its standard immediately before it began counting. A neighboring county actually has begun looking at ballots punched twice to predict, like Dionne Warwick's Psychic Network, who voters really meant to count. The boards setting these subjective and variant standards are Democratically-controlled and subject to rather obvious biases.
Clearly, as Palm Beach County and others have decided to hold complete hand counts, Gore will pick up hundreds of votes. More than likely, he will gain enough votes to win Florida. After losing any possible court battles to stop the hand counts, the Bush campaign will face the unfortunate choice of either conceding or initiating challenges in numerous states, further discrediting the nation's electoral process. Surrounded by statesmen such as James Baker, Dick Cheney and Colin Powell, Bush probably will act in a statesman-like way and go quietly into the night.
In contrast, Gore, surrounded by his own personal lifelong desires to be president, has already shown himself as one willing to use every means possible to dilute the votes of the millions of persons who actually managed to vote correctly. Unfortunately, his tactics probably will win him the White House for the year 2000. It will not win him any self-respecting American's respect. He should be ashamed. Of course, I'm dreaming about that last part.
(Seth Wood's column appears Wednesdays in The Cavalier Daily.)
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