The Will of the People
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By J. PETER MULHERN
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I was disenfranchised.
My vote was counted in every presidential election between 1976 and 1996. In the year 2000 I changed my voter registration from one Maryland county to another and my name mysteriously disappeared from the list of registered voters.
I recently moved from predominantly black and Democratic Prince George's County to predominantly white and Republican Anne Arundel County. I voted in the Republican primary in Prince George's County and then filed the paperwork to change my voter registration to my new address. Anne Arundel County never got my name on a list and Prince George's County no longer has any record of my registration.
At least four other similarly situated Bush voters were also disenfranchised in my precinct alone. We are waiting for Jesse Jackson and his rent-a-mob to drop by so we can all link arms and sing We shall Overcome.
The loss of my vote could result from bureaucratic inefficiency. Given the rampant corruption of Maryland state government and the one-party control of that government, fraud is a more plausible explanation. Either way, the system is badly bent.
So badly bent that anyone claiming to discern the "will of the people" in the result of a close election should be ashamed of their demagoguery. Which brings me to the unseemly politics of the last week.
Contrary to popular belief, we don't have an electoral process that reflects the will of the people, which is probably a good thing. Most of the people don't give a rat's hind end who sits in the White House as long as the cable company delivers good reception.
The process by which we choose our leaders has no inherent legitimacy. It is just a game with rules according to which we designate winners and losers. The outcome of the game is only legitimate to the extent that we all agree it should be. With the presidency hanging in the balance and tension rising on all sides it is important to remember this. Political crises generate bad arguments faster than early-bird specials sell out in Fort Lauderdale. Keeping our bearings should help us identify the real clunkers.
The worst of the lot is the suggestion that Al Gore's dwindling edge in "the popular vote" nationwide gives him some sort of moral claim to the presidency.
We set up a ballot, we cast the votes, we count the votes, the candidate with the most votes wins the electoral votes from each state. The candidate with a majority of the electoral votes wins. That's the game. This year, George W. Bush won the game.
If Gore wins a plurality of the nationwide popular vote his supporters will grumble about the will of the people. They started doing so even before all the votes were certified. This grumbling is just the background noise losers typically generate.
We will never know who got more valid votes from genuine, living, properly registered, U.S. citizens. My educated guess is that netting out the impact of the grosser forms of voter fraud, Bush won the popular vote by a significant margin. We know, for example, that the Clinton/Gore folks ran the INS as a voter mill for years.
I can't establish with mathematical precision the impact of fraud on Democrat vote totals. Our commitment to the rules of the game requires us to accept certified election results as valid. Unfortunately, a certain amount of cheating is part of the game. Democrats want us to accept the rules of the game for purposes of establishing their vote totals but they want everyone to ignore the rules of the game when it comes to determining the significance of those vote totals.
They can't have it both ways. Either they accept the rules and the outcomes they generate or they don't. If they don't, we will quickly find ourselves settling political disputes the old-fashioned way -- with violence. If Democrats attack the game selectively they will destroy it and ultimately the tanks will roll.
The rules of the game establish that the nationwide vote totals have no significance. The Gore people know this so they are busy trying to steal Florida's electoral votes.
By curious coincidence, Democrats feel that "the will of the people" entitles them to win in Florida just as it entitles them to win in the nation. As I write this, they are expressing their feelings in two ways.
First, they have requested a recount by hand of ballots in some of the Florida precincts that voted most heavily for Gore. This recount is now underway. If this recount has any impact on the outcome of the presidential race it will be a travesty.
Essentially Democrats want the vote in their strongest precincts counted more inclusively than the vote that favors Bush. It isn't clear how this would make the vote more likely to conform with the will of the people.
Democrats hope they can convince fallible and probably partisan human beings to include in the final tally votes that machines could not read. Any result based on selective hand counting where most of the vote, and the entire vote in Republican areas, is counted by machine would be patently fraudulent. Nobody will accept the outcome of a game unless the rules are the same for everyone.
To recount the entire state by hand would be hugely cumbersome and would certainly introduce much more error than it cured. The best possible tally of the valid votes cast in Florida is already in and George Bush won it.
The Democrats' other desperate ploy has to do with a challenge to the ballot in Palm Beach County that, they say, confused some of the poor dears who tried to vote for Gore but just couldn't get it right. Here again, the idea is that the will of the people must prevail. Apparently a judge is now supposed to reconstruct the intent of voters who were too careless, too blind, too senile, or too stupid to express their vote clearly on a ballot.
There may have been confusion in Palm Beach County but this cannot justify any relief. There was confusion all over Florida on Election Day and all over the nation. We can't remedy confusion in one case where it hurt Gore without remedying every other case of confusion. Palm Beach County was not the only place where a surprising number of Floridians cast invalid ballots. Much the same thing happened in Duval County, a Bush stronghold. The process is badly flawed, but the sort of flaw the Democrats are complaining about in Palm Beach County is random and tends to balance out.
Democrats want a perfect world for their candidate while the other guy struggles with the imperfections of the real world. They will never get that in court. Even if they did, the nation would never accept the court's decision. I, for one, would set about organizing a tax strike if Gore gained the presidency on the strength of such a decision. The challenge to the Palm Beach ballot is a non-starter and Democrats know it.
The only possible purpose of that challenge is to make people doubt the legitimacy of Bush's victory. It is, in other words, an attack on the rules of the game. This is part of a very risky scheme. If the Democrats have any decency or shame they will back off. Sadly, the last eight years have clearly demonstrated that decency and shame are in very short supply among Democrats.
The game is over and George W. Bush is the president-elect. There are still some overseas absentee ballots to be counted in Florida but given recent history, if those ballots showed a big majority for Gore that majority would be prima facie evidence of fraud. Nothing good can come from disputing the controlling legal authority of an election.
The voters have had the last word and it is time for the Democrats to sit down and shut up. Either we play the game by its rules and accept the outcome or we wind up in the jungle.
Please, Mr. Gore, come back from the edge.
J. Peter Mulhern can be reached at jpmulh@aol.com
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Published in the Nov. 13, 2000 issue of The Washington Weekly. (http://washington-weekly.com) Copyright © 2000
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