THE GREATEST aspect of being an American is the ability to alter one's political and social decisions solely on the basis of the perceived benefit. The Republican Party changes its stance on election policy when it suits its best interests, but apparently it doesn't feel that Joeblo American in New Jersey has the same right. The issue concerns last week's announcement that New Jersey Democratic Sen. Robert Torricelli was dropping out of his reelection campaign five weeks before the election due to a fundraising scandal for which he was admonished by the Senate this summer. Republicans are now fighting to prevent Democrats from replacing Torricelli on the ballot.
Apparently, they have been confusing the real New Jersey with the fictional mob world of television's "The Sopranos," where failure to recycle might be met with a savage beating with an election stylus. The American electoral system is about free choice of representatives, not political mobsters bullying state courts to bar others from competing.
Because the deadline for switching candidates on New Jersey ballots is 51 days before the deadline (Torricelli dropped out 36 days before, 15 days), the Democrats are technically not allowed to put a replacement on the ballot. Citing fair play and freedom of choice, the Democrats successfully petitioned the state supreme court to allow a switch. However, Republicans are determined to fight the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. Apparently, "compassionate conservatism" has been replaced by "you snooze, you lose."
There are no hanging or dimpled chads open to interpretation as there were in the Florida fiasco of 2000, only the debate over whether to allow people to have a choice. Laws are laws and cannot be broken arbitrarily, but election laws pertaining to candidate application were designed with the goal of keeping elections organized, fair and efficient. Any argument that requires sidestepping established law is always on shaky ground, but the spirit of the laws must necessarily be held paramount to the exact letter of the law in such cases.
People should be given a choice, and denial of it on the grounds of a missed deadline is absurd. Republicans grumble that the Democrats are -- gasp -- trying to replace a failure with a better option. To think that anyone in America would make a mistake and have the audacity to believe that they could try to circumvent the "rule of one chance" and try again!
The issue is simple: Give the people of New Jersey a choice or justify the rejection of a replacement candidate. Appealing to laws which were meant to ensure an efficient election is a flawed argument against allowing a replacement. If the election can be performed on time and there are no extra costs (the Democrats will pick up the tab in this case), the spirit of the law is maintained and, more importantly, the American ideal of open and free elections is preserved.
Republicans do not want to give people a choice in New Jersey, yet they are angered by Hawaiian Democrats campaigning for citizens to vote for the recently deceased Rep. Patsy Mink, and hence a Democratic replacement to be named later. So if the people of Hawaii want a Democratic candidate in the House, they're out of luck. And if the people of New Jersey don't want a Republican, there's always the Green Party -- well maybe not the Green Party (talk about flushing your vote down the dirty toilet of politics).
With the specter of a Supreme Court case lingering, the people of New Jersey are no worse than they were before Torricelli's departure and the state court's acceptance of his replacement. The Democratic Party is paying for the cost of reprinting ballots and for all the fuss; New Jersey citizens are not being hurt by the decision. They deserve a choice in their elections. If the Republicans want to take the moral high ground and declare it wrong to adjust election laws as if they were meaningless, they need to prove that the people of New Jersey are now or will be harmed by the decision.
President Bush attacked Senate Democrats a few weeks back and would make it seem un-American to criticize him or the impending attack on Iraq, but his party goes further and declares it unlawful and un-American to accept fair play in elections. Elections are about the expression of the will of the people, but the Republican Party seems to think that it's all right to say, "Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, you missed the deadline, so you lose."
Regrettably, those who support the state court's decision will be denounced as partisans who only take the position they do because it serves their political alignment. Every day people do what is needed to provide the best individual outcome. But it is a truly shameful day when the ideal of fair play is disregarded in favor of spineless adherence to technical rules that were never derived to support such claims. And people wonder why Americans are so cynical.
(Brad Cohen's column appears Thursdays in The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at bcohen@cavalierdaily.com.)
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