As they say in Italy "Non tutto il male viene per nuocere" (Not all bad things come for the sake of doing harm).
Three weeks after the elections Americans still don't know who their next President will be, nor do they have an inking about when they might make that discovery.
Other countries are still looking on in amazement as the country representing quintessential democracy struggles with an electoral system full of flaws. However, all admit that had the same thing happened in their countries, there would have been variations on the theme of public display ranging from tanks in the streets, civil war, or, at the very least, piazzas full of rowdy if not violent demonstrators. They are awed by the patience of the American people to allow the democratic process take its painstakingly slow course. That is, with the exception of the little riot staged in Dade County last week apparently by Republican demonstrators imported from out of state and financed by the Bush campaign in order to discourage (successfully one might add) the manual count in that county. Nevertheless, this election fiasco is an opportunity to a make some long needed reforms, if only we will rise to the occasion.
Twelve years ago, the peril of chads and the vicissitude of the Votomatic were described in a detailed study sent to every election jurisdiction in the United States. Conducted by the esteemed ECRI Laboratory in Pennsylvania, the two-volume "Election Administrator's Guide to Computerized Voting" had been commissioned by the Markle Foundation of Manhattan.
The year-long study came down with a particularly heavy indictment against the Votomatic punch ballot system used in Florida. Its faultfinding regarded the punchouts or chads that were often not completely detached. These were liable to fold back in place and refill the hole causing the electronic vote reader to register them as a blank ballot. The study also noted that the chads were likely to produce a different result even when they were run through a second machine count.
The hand count that the Republicans have sought by every means to block is seemingly the most accurate way to tally ballots produced by this system developed by IBM in 1964. According to William Rouverol, the retired mechanical engineer and professor at the University of California at Berkley who invented the Votomatic, the problem with the machine counting of these ballots was evident from the beginning. Indeed, IBM had found the system to be so problematic that four years later the company decided to get out of the ballot business altogether!
Bush campaign officials were also extremely vocal about the possible spontaneous or "mischievous" dislodging of chads from ballot punch card ballots that would result from a manual count. However, Rouverol assures that in months of handling punch cards with his colleague, Joe Harris, they "never had a perforated chad fall out of a card due to handling." Rouverol also informs that the system was not designed to accommodate the two-page "butterfly ballot" and that such use had been highly discouraged by the pair of inventors.
Twelve years ago the "Miami Herald" reported that the National Bureau of Standards was investigating complaints about inaccuracies in punch card voting systems in Palm Beach County and in other jurisdictions around the country. Their report recommended the elimination of punch card ballots altogether. The advice was ignored. Hopefully, this debacle will help us overcome what have been the biggest obstacles to any wholesale upgrading of the national ballot technology: expense and inertia.
The Bush campaign mantra was based on the notion of "trust in the American people." Had the Bush camp put its money where its mouth was by allowing a statewide hand recount of all votes in all the counties in Florida (including Republican counties in which it could have enfranchised some undercounting of its own constituents), Americans would now know who they had voted for. Now, courts or no courts, lawyers or no lawyers, they will probably never have any certainty as to who really won.
Katherine Harris says, "The true winner in the election is the rule of law." (As opposed to the will of the American people?) Bush says, "Now that the votes are counted it is time for the votes to count." (Some of the votes, some of the time?) Lieberman says, "How can we teach our children that every vote counts if we are not willing to make a good-faith effort to count every vote?" Indeed, how can we?
I say, since an election in which only some of the votes are counted isn't worth diddlysquat, the only equitable and expeditious thing to do for this election is to simply toss a coin. Of course, that would involve such complications as deciding which coin to use, who gets heads and who gets tails, who gets to toss the coin, who announces which way it has fallen, and with our luck, in all probability (and in accordance with the will of the people) the damn thing will land on its side!
November 2000
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