That’s what Walt Whitman called it, and I like it. It has a small-town feel to it, and makes you feel as if your vote counts. Donna and I chose early by mail-in ballot; I hope everyone reading this chose as well. Whichever way you voted, you made history today.
But back to choosing day, and whether our votes really do count. They didn’t in 2000. Thanks to our antiquated and bizarre system of electing presidents, the loser won.
There have been hundreds of attempts to replace our electoral college system with a direct popular vote. Just because it hasn’t happened yet is no reason to give up the fight.
My vote didn’t count in 2000. I think it counted today, and hope to find out later tonight. But I want my vote, and your vote too, to count every time.
Paul, I take it you are referring to the electoral fiasco in Florida in 2000. There were approx 60,000 contested ballots (commonly referred to as undervotes) in all of Florida’s 67 counties. USA Today, Knight-Ridder, and the Miami Herald commissioned BDO Seidman, an accounting firm, to recount all 60,000. This did not include the 3500 or so absentee ballots from the military that were never opened because they only had a cancellation stamp as opposed to a postmark, even though they were received before election day. Florida state law required a postmark, and it is black-letter law that an election is conducted by the election law in place at the time of election, no matter how screwed up it may be.
BDO evaluated each ballot with six different protocols (hanging shad, dimpled shad, etc.). As I recall it took about three months. In all of the protocols (strict and liberal) where the entire state was counted, Bush came out the winner.
Now for the irony. The Dems wanted a partial recount in Miami-Dade.
The results were most interesting. In Miami-Dade County, 4892 ballots had no marks at all, 1,555 could be liberally attributed to Gore, and 1506 to Bush. When the stricter protocols were applied, i.e dimpled shad were not counted, but hanging shad were, Bush gained. Sorry, I can’t remember the exact number as I suffer CRS and my notes are incomplete.
The Repubs also wanted a partial recount, around the Jacksonville areas, as I recall. See above remarks about CRS. In that one, care to guess who won? Gore.
To the best of my knowledge this was not published by any Knight-Ridder paper or the Miami Herald, and was buried deep in USA Today in one issue. Go figure.
I remember reading somewhere that the National Opinion Research Center also did a recount with similar results but I never took the time to research it.
One last item. The US Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount by a vote of seven to two, not five to four as widely reported. See writ of certiorari, Bush v. Gore, Dec 12, 2000,
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/00-949.ZPC.html
So what is the lesson from all this? Facts mean nothing in politics. It is all appearance and spin.
Dick, I grant you all those numbers. My beef is not with the Florida recount but with the electoral system itself. Gore won the popular vote, Bush lost (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html).
Sometimes I think we’d be better off with a parliamentary system. Elect legislators and let them choose the executive. If I wanted to vote Green, for example, my vote, along with the votes of the 10% or so of the population who would vote Green with me, would result in some number of seats in the house. Perhaps our Green representatives, by going in with representatives of other small parties, could have some influence on selecting the executive, and some influence on government policy as well. The idea appeals to me. Sort of like giving the A-10s to the Army. Who says things have to be the way they are?
I totally agree with your last statement, by the way. In the weeks leading up to Nov 4th, I’d see polls on the internet that consistently showed Obama winning the electoral count with considerably over 300 votes to McCain with 170 or so. Yet the media felt a closer race, or the appearance of a closer race, was in its own best interest, and kept pushing the notion that the two candidates were neck to neck. My lesson from that? Read the papers, watch TV, listen to NPR, dig around on the net; in general, put some personal effort into being informed . . . no one’s going to do it for you.