Let the hand count continue
Why is the Bush camp defending the sovereign right of
machines to count votes? Because they're afraid they'll lose
their narrow edge if all Florida's ballots are counted.
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By Bruce Shapiro
Nov. 12, 2000 | Candidate George W. Bush repeatedly
declared that he opposes "activist" federal judges "legislating
from the bench." But that is exactly what Bush has now asked
U.S. District Judge Donald M. Middlebrooks to do: arbitrarily
overrule the manual recount of presidential ballots in Palm
Beach and at least two other Florida counties, a recount
unquestionably permitted under Florida law and requested by
the county's own election commissioners. So much for states'
rights.
By filing a federal lawsuit against the recount, Bush and his
consigliere James Baker have badly misplayed their hand.
There is no conceivable harm to the public interest in a final,
precise count in the presence of observers from both camps; a
manual count in Palm Beach and other closely contested
Florida counties will rob no voters of their rights. To the
contrary, every poll shows that after the initial emotions of
Election Day, the overwhelming majority of the public -- once
again more sensible and patient than the Beltway spinmeisters
of either party -- prefers accuracy over speed, credibility over
closure. Newsweek reported that 72 percent of Americans
agree with the Democrats that it's more important to get the
vote count right than get it done fast.
You almost had to feel sorry for Baker this
weekend, having to stand in front of
reporters and try to make the case that
machines, not people, ought to pick our next
president.
"Machines are neither Republicans nor
Democrats -- and therefore can be neither
consciously nor unconsciously biased,"
Baker argued. A manual count, he says,
"opens up tremendous possibilities for human
error, something worse than human error --
for mischief."
Why, then, did Gov. George Bush himself sign a 1997 Texas
law saying that manual recounts "shall be conducted in
preference to an electronic recount"? In fact, there is no
evidence that a manual recount in the presence of qualified
observers is more prone to either error or corruption. To the
contrary: The punch-card ballot system in Florida and Texas is
vulnerable to all sorts of mechanical error owing to the
limitations of punch-card readers and minor mistakes by
voters.
At a Tallahassee press conference on Saturday, Florida
election officials revealed that in last Tuesday's election, there
were far more problems in counties using the punch-card
system than the optical scan system, or OpScan. In punch-card
counties, 32 ballots per thousand cast had to be invalidated.
But in counties using the optical scan system, or OpScan, only
two per thousand were thrown out. Around Florida, and
throughout the county, election reformers are trying to move
away from the punch-card system. Massachussetts has
stopped using them entirely; so has San Francisco County.
Coincidentally or not, Florida counties using the OpScan
system tend to be Republican, while the punch-card counties
are disproportionately Democratic. And one Republican
county still using punch cards, Seminole, voluntarily hand
counted its ballots when it conducted its state-mandated
recount last week -- and gave another 98 votes to Bush, his
largest county gain in the recount.
The real issue is neither legal technicality nor the engineering of
voting machines. It is the credibility of the closest election in
American history -- an outcome already thrown into doubt by
Palm Beach County's disastrous excursion into graphic design
on its ballots, by 30,000 discarded or erroneously punched
voting cards, by the 3,407 votes that went to Pat Buchanan
(three and a half times his total in any other county), by credible
allegations of irregularities in some African-American and other
minority precincts.
One only needs to look at Palm Beach results in other races,
besides the presidential contest, to understand that something
went wrong with the balloting. Where an astonishing 19,000
Palm Beach presidential ballots had to be discarded because
voters picked more than one candidate -- known as overvoting
-- the rate was far less for other races. The Palm Beach
overvote rate was .13 percent in the race for Florida's
education commissioner, .13 percent for insurance
commissioner and .82 percent for U.S. Senate. For the
presidential race, though, the overvote rate jumped to 4.1
percent.
Given what's at stake, what's needed is more transparency, not
less. Instead of cutting short the manual recount in Palm Beach
County, a manual recount ought to be sought for each of the 14
Florida counties whose final tallies still have not been certified
by the secretary of state.
Bush and his GOP capos are playing the Florida recount like a
mafia war -- "They hit us, we hit them back," as Sonny
Corleone says. With this lawsuit, Bush has, overnight, betrayed
his campaign promise of civility and bipartisanship, which is
why his strategy is being bluntly criticized by Sen. John
McCain.
The governor's motives are almost embarassingly transparent:
to avoid losing the few hundred votes that place Florida in his
column, and to buy time hoping the public swings his way out
of sheer weariness.
In a year dominated by voters' mistrust of the electoral
machinery, that's a dangerous game, and his frivolous lawsuit is
his most cynical and constitutionally dubious move yet. Judge
Middlebrooks ought to throw Gov. Bush out on his ear. The
hand counts, not only in Palm Beach County, must go on. |
