Florida Redux...

I've been under the weather for the last week or so, so I've dug up some of my old writings from the archives.  Before blogs, and back when we thought that newpaper editors felt some need to express alternate viewpoints, we used to write them letters.  Here's one I wrote exactly 4 years ago today: December 20th, 2000.

Editor,

At a holiday party recently when the election was the topic of the day, I was rather surprised by how many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent people held opinions that were hateful, exclusionary and downright anti-democracy.  I could only think that they were either misled, or were themselves strong Bush supporters desperately grasping at straws to rationalize the results.  Their arguments included such gems as:

1. "Too dumb to vote."  There are a lot of variations on this theme, the most offensive of which are the jokes suggesting that Florida residents are so stupid that their votes shouldn't count.  The fact is that voting is a right, not a privilege, and no one can erect arbitrary barriers that prevent votes from being counted.  If the voting machines are too difficult for people to use properly we should be outraged, not amused.

2. "Only machine-readable votes are legal."  Although this seemed to be Sandra Day O'Connor's argument, it reveals remarkable ignorance.  By Florida law, a legal vote is one where the intention of the voter is clear, and any other standard would be changing the rules after the fact.  If machines are rejecting ballots that a reasonable human could interpret, then legal votes are being lost.

3.  "There's no objective way to read ambiguous ballots."  This core argument in the Republican case directly assaults rationality itself.  It's not as if this were the first manual recount ever attempted.  In fact, manual recounts have been used in other races to overturn machine results and place Republicans into office.  Had there been a commitment to a recount by both sides, it would have been very easy to agree on a protocol that would assure fairness, impartiality and accuracy without changing the standards defined by the Florida legislature.

4.  "Hanging Chad and Dimples."  Implicit in many arguments is the belief that only ballots punched “improperly” get rejected.  What people who have never used punched cards don’t realize is that the machines can reject up to 1 in 500 for other reasons.  Running the same ballots through the machines again does not correct these errors.  For an election this close, a systematic bias of as much as 0.2% places the result in doubt.

5.  "Gore would have kept recounting until he won."  Perhaps, but we'll never know since he was denied even one manual recount which is accepted procedure in Florida and most other states.  If he had requested a second recount this might be a valid complaint, but it can't be used as a reason to deny even a single hand recount.

6.  "Bush probably would have won the recount anyway."  Even as post-hoc rationalization, this one is weak.  Although it's possible he would have won a hand recount, that's not a reason to prevent it in the first place.

At the very least this election debacle has engendered a national dialog on voting procedure.  I only hope that the reforms we get are better informed than the kind of woolly thinking that shows up at cocktail parties, and the Supreme Court.

Ah, the good old days of contested elections and manual recounts.  It sure was good we fixed all those problems so we never have to have all those stupid arguments again.

- jack*

Comments

[bedrocktruth]

Merry Christmas, Jack!!