Given our proximity to Election 2002, I have dug into my archives and decided to post some of the things I originally wrote back then, but never made public.
When a burgeoning democracy takes its first uncertain steps, America
is usually there to provide advice, assistance and election observers.
We promote uniformity, fairness and an adherence to democratic ideals
over the new and untested institutions. If we had had official
foreign observers in place for our election in 2000, they would have
decried it as nonuniform, unfair, and our Constitution would have been
declared counter to the ideals of democracy.
But we didn't. We are too strong and established for that. We can
observe our own elections, thank you very much. What we got instead
were blathering politicians pontificating about how we are a "nation
of laws," while simultaneously ignoring the fact that we've got a whole truckload of BAD election laws, starting with the electoral college and trickling all the way down to the vague statutory standards for determining the "intent of the voter" in a hand recount.
As a kid, playing games with my friends at the local park, we quickly
learned the inherent fairness of the "do-over". We all knew the
rules, but when interpretations conflicted and there wasn't sufficient
authority around to mediate the dispute, we'd just start over.
Election 2000 screamed for a do-over and hypothetical observers would
have insisted upon it, but it never came, because we are a "nation of
laws," and those laws do not allow it.
Instead, a candidate was declared the victor even though he lost the
popular vote, even though he supressed the counting of ballots in the
state of Florida, even though he hypocritically dragged the recount
procedure into federal court in opposition to his own stated political
philosophies against litigiousness and federal control. Unofficial
hand counts of the Florida ballots have shown that if all the votes were counted (including overvotes) Gore would have won, regardless of the counting standard employed. In other words, our Supreme Court selected a candidate who did not deserve to win.
We would not tolerate this in another country's elections. We would
self-righteously denounce it as fraud. But on our own soil, once we
bored of the spectacle, it was more important to squeeze a concession
out of the ordained loser than uphold any democratic ideals.
Bipartisanship was called for rather than outrage.
We deserve better than the electoral college, as convoluted and
chaotic a scheme for selecting a leader as has ever been devised. We
deserve better than arbitrary vote-counting deadlines which favor
expediency over accuracy. We deserve better than a hodge-podge
mish-mash of out-dated voting technologies that discriminate against
the poor. We deserve better than contradictory election statutes
which prevent, rather than ensure accurate counts.
Americans tend to be cynical about a great many topics, but I do not
feel that we can afford cynicism about the most fundamental democratic
right: that when we cast a vote it will be counted.
2:27:01 PM 
|
