Faulkner Was Right, and 2000 Isn't Over
Faulkner was right, and that's what makes HBO's Recount so hard to sit through: It isn't that we know how it's going to end. It's that it hasn't ended, and isn't past, for our asthmatic planet or our military families or our still wholly unreformed electoral process.
On the electoral front, Dahlia, your point about sagging voter confidence being self-fulfilling is dead right. But do we boost that confidence by telling African-American Ohioans who waited for hours in the rain to vote in 2004—because Franklin County redistributed voting machines from inner-city polling places where they were in short supply to rural areas where there were too many—that their concerns are "idiotic'' or that voter suppression is all in their heads? Every study of electronic voting machines suggests they're hackable, prone to glitches and easy to upgrade—for a price. (And if ATMs were half as unreliable, wouldn't we have solved the problem before you could say, "Katherine Harris actually wore that?'') The real question is how much voter confidence is worth to us, since solutions on the cheap haven't worked that well.
After the train wreck of the 2000 recount, Florida's Sarasota County purchased electronic voting machines from Election Systems & Software, the same company that produced the ballots of hanging-chad fame. (This despite the fact that, as this barely seen but excellent Dan Rather documentary argues, ES&S was having a hard time marketing its touch-screen voting machines until it decided to cut back on the quality of paper used to make the ballots that wound up dimpled and hanging in 2000. The company's own quality-control folks refused to sign off on the change and warned their bosses that if they went with the cheaper paper, it would expand in the Florida humidity and be a big old mess by Election Day. They were ignored, but they were right. And when their predictions came true, their company was rewarded with contracts for the shiny new electronic voting machines they'd been having trouble unloading. Whee!)
OK, so now it's 2006, and those same ES& Smachines work their magic in Sarasota County, where thousands of people sign affidavits that they had trouble casting ballots in just one race, for Democratic Congressional candidate Christine Jennings, who according to the machine tally lost by fewer than 400 votes. Golly, can't let that happen again, so the super magnanimous Charlie Crist, the state's new Republican governor, says let's do away with those touch-screen machines that leave no paper trail. Only, tucked into the wildly popular bill that did away with paperless ballots was ... the provision that moved up the date of the state's presidential primary and led to the current fight over what to do about Florida's delegates to this summer's Democratic National Convention. Republicans in the state "knew exactly what they were doing,'' says Christine Jennings, who is still running against Vern Buchanan. Only, he's an incumbent now. That the solutions just keep making things worse makes you wonder how seriously we take the problem. And as long as we put the need for voting reform on a par with taking on little green men, 2000 won't ever be over.
P.S. to Ruth: A blog virgin, who knew? I agree she didn't mean TO say it. But that's not the same as not meaning what she said.