He's baaaaack. Hide under your desks, put away your butterfly ballots, cover your children's ears from the droning sound of James Baker--pregnant chad is back in the headlines.
With a great big yawn, that is.
One year after the 2000 election debacle, we now know the following:
1) If the U.S. Supreme Court had not enjoined the vote-counting that Al Gore had requested--to have just the undervotes counted in select counties--George W. Bush would still have been elected president.
2) If Gore had asked for a recount of every ballot in the state and the U.S. Supreme Court had decided to allow all the ballots to be counted--both the overvote and the undervote ballots--then Gore would currently be our commander-in-chief and Bush would be back in Texas, probably executing people.
3) The Supreme Court looks like the biggest loser. Justice Antonin Scalia's worry about protecting a Bush presidency from "irreparable harm" not only made a dubious logical flaw (what if, Antonin, Bush didn't actually win?) but also resulted in an unnecessary politicizing of the Supreme Court. Justice John Paul Stevens had it right: "Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year's election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law."
4) The Gore legal team employed a strategy slightly better than the O.J. Simpson jury selection team--by discounting overvotes and focusing only on the undervotes, Gore had no chance of winning.
5) If you were black or poor or both, then your vote was more than three times more likely to be thrown out; if you lived in a majority black or poor or both district, then you were all but certain to vote using the near-prehistoric and now-extinct butterfly ballot. This is tantamount to a grave civil rights injustice--systematically cutting the black and poor vote out of the election. As we learned last spring, this was facilitated by Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and a massive voter registration purge that cut a whole lot of proper black and poor voters from the rolls. Oops.
So what does this all mean? Well, on Sept. 10, this would likely have meant a lot of partisan bickering, rambling and declarations by many people who are running for president that Dubya is as legit as a three dollar bill. From Sept. 11 on, this story is officially not news. White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer is refusing to comment on the story and about the only people you will see on television debating this are legal scholars who are desperate to bump war scholars off of CNN (bring back Greta!) and Gore campaign officials and legal experts who devised the game-losing strategy.
Aside from the talking head crowd, this story is not going to make waves. That is not necessarily a bad thing, as nothing will change the outcome of the election or occupant of the White House, and this was true even on Sept. 10. We need to focus on constructive ways of using this information. Hopefully this news will serve as impetus for congressional leaders to move the stalled federal voting reform bill on the agenda, out of committee and passed before the end of the year.
Overzealous patriots and desperate-for-attention news-talk hosts like Bill O'Reilly, Brit Hume and Christopher Matthews suggested a few weeks ago that the terrorist attacks would make other issues irrelevant and unimportant. Although it may be true that our national priorities have shifted, by no means should we let election reform and other pertinent issues from a patients bill of rights to campaign finance reform (way to go Bloomberg!) wither on the vine. There is an important distinction between inaction and delayed action.
Given the way that this news is going to be shrugged off, one starts to feel bad for the consortium of newspapers and wire services that spent $900,000 reviewing every single ballot in the state of Florida. That's a lot of money to spend on something with a news half-life of 24 hours. The whole story has become little more than a race for the catchiest headline.
The notorious and usually conservative Drudge Report ran with, "Gore Topped Bush if all Under/Over Votes Counted; Legal Strategy Destroyed Chances." Fairly accurate--surprising for Drudge.
The reliably conservative Wall Street Journal led with, "In Election Review, Bush Wins Without Supreme Court Help." That's not exactly all the news that's fit to print, but then again, the Journal seldom is.
My favorite headline comes from the Los Angeles Times, which casts an appropriately flippant tone to the whole review process and its laboriously complicated results, "Bush Wins, Gore Wins--Depends How Ballots are Added Up." Indeed. That's what our country needs--two presidents, or maybe a time-share.
As we say goodbye to pregnant chad, hanging-door chad, overvote, undervote, Votomatic and other buzz words from last November and December, let us not forget that unless we pass election reform and guarantee the best voting technology to all voters, a repeat of that disaster could be just 12 months away.
Trinity senior Martin Barna is projects editor for The Chronicle and film editor for Recess.
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