Proofiness - Charles Seife [61]
As the curtain opened on the election drama, the actors took up their assigned roles without a moment’s hesitation. Gore, like Franken, was behind, so he was cast in the role of the flag-waving champion of the disenfranchised; he had to find votes to count, preferably from pro-Gore districts, in hopes of catching up with Bush. His eyes turned first to areas that were Gore strongholds: Volusia, Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Broward counties. His team argued that these four (Gore-supporting) counties, plagued by punch-card errors, must be recounted by hand rather than by machine—machines weren’t able to count improperly punched ballots. At the same time, though, a hand count would likely introduce new errors. Punch cards are relatively fragile. The very act of handling them would alter a number of ballots—causing some loose chads to fall out. Unlike hardy pen-marked, bubbled-in ballots, punch-card ballots can be spoiled merely by handling them. What’s more, it’s not obvious how to interpret a ballot with a chad that’s still partially attached. Did it represent a genuine vote, or was it an artifact of somebody’s handling the ballot too roughly? These were judgment calls that almost certainly were introducing error into the count—and that partisan observers would fight over in attempts to gather votes for their candidates. The Florida courts, largely populated with Democrat-appointed judges, tended to side with Gore and his count-every-vote argument.
Bush was ahead, so he was cast in the role of spoiler. He immediately declared victory and claimed that his opponent was attempting to steal the election. (Republicans quickly branded the Gore-Lieberman ticket as “Sore-Loserman.”) More important, Bush and his team had to counter Gore’s maneuvers. When Gore tried to get recounts started, Bush fought in the courts to stop them dead—but he was rebuffed. Luckily for Bush, though, he had another recourse. The governor of Florida happened to be his younger brother, so the state government, which is in charge of administering the election, was full of Bush partisans. The secretary of state, Katherine Harris, and the head of Florida’s division of elections, L. Clayton Roberts, were clearly in the Bush camp; though they attempted to appear fair-minded, to all outward appearances they worked as hard as they could (within the constraints of their offices) to kill Gore’s recounts dead, with great success. When Gore won in the courts, the state government mooted those victories.
The main plotline in the Bush versus Gore drama followed this pattern over and over again. All the dirty dealing, infighting, manipulation, lying, and nastiness added texture to the tale, but didn’t alter its trajectory. Gore and his allies pushed to get more votes included in the tallies. (Count every vote!) Bush and his allies used deadlines and strict interpretations of laws and regulations to block those votes from getting hand-counted and, when that strategy failed, to keep the hand counts from being included in the official tally. (Rules are rules!) Gore tended to prevail in the courts, but the court victories were often made worthless by a counterattack from pro-Bush state officials. The recounts started and stopped in response to a flurry of lawsuits, judicial rulings, and election memos.
A secondary