More on Florida 2000

Regarding Joeseph's comment, I would second that there was an underappreciation of constitutional law as well as an underappreciation of the electoral college in this case. My view of the Florida partisan acrimony boils down to the Republicans pointing at the Florida state constitution and laws passed by the legislature dictating procedures and deadlines (knowing that timely closure was to their advantage), versus the Democrats running to the courts to get delays, exceptions, and recounts until the numbers came out better. It's a heavily biased view yes, and the Republicans ran to their own court after the Florida Supremes weighed in, but I can argue it up if someone really wants to revisit that. I think what Joeseph is pointing out is the blessing of written law versus the alternative of a political struggle without end, and I agree.

As for the electoral college, it got a lot of bad press because Gore supposedly won the nationwide popular vote but not the college (the college is "an anachronism," being a common gripe at the time). College detractors, however, refused to consider the inevitable alternative if the college did not exist. I'll explain: How do we know that Gore really won the nationwide popular vote? In a number of states, tabulation of presidential ballots from outlying districts ceased when the victory of one or the other candidate in that state was mathematically assured. So not every vote was counted. With the electoral college, it is technically not necessary to do so. But if we're without the college, to re-use a phrase from Florida, shouldn't "every vote count?" Presumably including all the mismarked ballots, the partial punches, the overvotes and illegible votes too. We'll need an army of commissioners and lawyers squinting at millions of ballots nationwide. Without the electoral college, my friends, we're taking the year 2000 election difficulties and multiplying them by fifty states. How the heck is that an improvement?

Now as for the specifics of Florida 2000, here's some observations. First off, the election supervisors in the four most-disputed Florida counties, and indeed in 41 of 67 total counties, were Democrats. If Gore or anyone else has a problem with the way the polls were run and the votes were counted, keep in mind these were principally Democrat politicos running the show down there. Next, in the manual recounts requested by Gore's lawsuits but which later got cut short, subsequent investigation has found that these scenarios also produce a Bush victory. Now there are ways, ex post facto, to play with the scope of the recounts and the vote-counting criteria to produce a Gore victory. A four-county manual recount focusing on overvotes, for example, would yield a Gore victory -- but Gore did not ask for such a recount. There are also a number of statewide recount scenarios that result in Gore victories. Again, these were not legally requested nor ordered by any court. If you want to play with the numbers yourself, there is an interesting web widget put up by the New York Times. Six different standards for punch ballots! Two standards for optical scan! Two standards for observer consensus! Have fun.

What does all this show? If anything, I would hope it underscores the absolute necessity of rigid standards and deadlines for vote tabulation. Undervotes? Overvotes? Baloney, in my view! If I'm writing the statutes, we either have a properly marked ballot (as described in the procedures and codified by state law) or it is not a vote, period. If a guy scrawls "GB" in green crayola on the optical-scan ballot, that's not a vote in Jujjsconsin! But if the Florida legislature wants to write laws on how to divine voter intent from hanging chads, double-punches, small indentations and so forth, they are at liberty to do so. The point is to have a fixed set of rules beforehand. One standard from which all counts are derived. I thought (silly me) that Florida already had that before 2000, but apparently they only had a sick comedy of criteria that mutated from county to county, and a battalion of vote-counters-turned-fortunetellers.