Chad All Over - elections 2000

Reason, August, 2001 by John J. Pitney Jr.

Assessing the 2000 presidential election

I had two reactions to the post-election struggle of 2000: elation and nostalgia. The elation came from years of teaching an introductory American government course, in which I always noted that the winner of the popular vote might still lose in the Electoral College. Gore's half-million-vote margin now allowed me to utter the five favorite words of teachers everywhere: "See, I told you so."

The nostalgia came from my hometown of Saratoga Springs, New York, where electoral shenanigans are a cherished part of local history. As a kid, I loved my grandfather's stories from the 1920s and 1930s, when poll workers used clever sleights-of-hand to spoil ballots marked for the "wrong" candidates. During the Florida recount, there was a familiar ring to news about manhandled punchcards and devoured chads. If heaven gets CNN, Gramp must have had great fun.

Most people, however, were less enthusiastic. By Thanksgiving, everybody had already heard enough jokes about Katherine Harris' makeup. The "Presidential Couple" sketch with Will Ferrell and Darrell Hammond was hilarious the first time, on Saturday Night Live, but it got more than a little tired after its 100th airing on MSNBC. And anyone following the news must have gotten sick of reading that the contest was a "civics lesson." A Nexis search reveals that the phrase turned up 158 times in major newspapers between Election Day and the end of the year.

With the trauma of all that media overkill still relatively fresh, is there anything new to say about Election 2000? No matter what we learn from these four new books on the topic, we will have to wait longer for a truly definitive treatment of the 2000 election. It takes more than a few months to gain perspective and sort out the significant from the momentarily interesting. In a presidential race, as with any historic event, a good deal of relevant information does not surface until much later. Yet, if it's too early to provide all the answers about the election, these books are still valuable for the issues they raise, especially with regard to events in Florida.

Bush v. Gore reprints the full text of key legal documents, as well as dozens of op-ed articles. 36 Days serves up New York Times reporting between the election and the final Supreme Court decision. If not exactly beach reading, both are highly useful reference works. Deadlock is a bulked-up version of an eight-part series in The Washington Post. It sums up the whole post-election 2000 saga in a smooth, readable narrative, including tidbits that did not become public while the controversy actively raged. We learn, for instance, that some of Bush's lawyers initially thought that the equal protection clause of the Constitution was a lame basis for challenging the hand counts.

Smashmouth, the only one of the four to focus on the campaign itself, not just the Florida imbroglio, derives from Dana Milbank's articles in the Post and The New Republic. In the tradition of Trail Fever, Michael Lewis' book on the 1996 race, Smashmouth forgoes straight reporting in favor of side (and often snide) commentary. Where Theodore H. White depicted presidential campaigns as pageants, the Trail Fever/Smashmouth genre treats them as freak shows. Like its predecessor, Smashmouth is generally amusing, but sometimes it's nasty for no good reason. Milbank quotes a bystander's description of Steve Forbes' campaign workers as "die Jungen," adding that "there is something very Germany 1938 about them." Steve Forbes as a terrifying, violent spellbinder? Milbank must have had a traumatized childhood, cowering at the sight of Mister Rogers and Captain Kangaroo.

So why was Florida so screwy? Many suspects are trotted out: the obsolete equipment, the odd political culture of Florida in general and Miami in particular, the partisan loyalties of the state's Democratic attorney general and Republican secretary of state. It's a mistake, however, to focus on Florida's peculiarities, since the only unusual aspects of its tally were its pivotal role in the presidential race and the amount of attention it drew. By historical standards, Florida did a fine job. In 1948, Lyndon Johnson won his Senate seat through massive fraud, which included one precinct where (through sheer coincidence, I'm sure) dozens of voters signed the rolls in alphabetical order with identical handwriting.

Florida was by no means the only state using voting machinery that invited tabulation error and voter confusion. More than 2 million ballots nationwide did not register a vote for president. One Indiana election official told The New York Times: "You know why we never paid attention to this until now? I'll tell you: because we don't really want to know."

Despite the forests felled in writing about this election, few observers spotted the underlying reason why so many things went so wrong in so many places. Governments run elections. If governments botch most of the things they do, why on earth should we expect them to become models of honesty and efficiency when it comes to choosing the people who lead them?