Unlike most people here… indeed, unlike MYSELF, most of the time… I am not going to offer an opinion as to who won the Presidential election, or how the votes should be counted. Frankly, I don’t KNOW the right way to do things at this point. No matter who is ultimately declared the winner, the “loser” and his followers will have every right and every reason to feel cheated. I just don’t see a good, fair solution that will be acceptable to everybody.
Still, I thought I’d bring up an anecdote from the 1988 election, just to illustrate a point. The “irregularities” we’re seeing in Florida are neither unusual nor (necessarily) the result of cheating. The truth is, in EVERY election, thousands of ballots are thrown out for one reason or another. MOST of the time, of course, the elections aren’t all that close, so these ballots don’t matter much.
But in 1988, the absentee ballots in the state of TExas did NOT make it clear that voters had to select George Bush and Dan Quayle (or Michael Dukakis and Lloyd Bentsen) as a team. The absentee ballots erroneously allowed voters to select a presidential and a vice presidential candidate from different tickets! Naturally, thousands of Texas voters (mostly military personnel and/or senior citizens) THOUGHT they could vote for George Bush for president and Lloyd Bentsen as vice president, and made that choice on their ballots.
Even if this WERE allowed (it ain’t), both Bush and Bentsen were Texas citizens, so that teamup wouldn’t be permissible. As a result, several thousand people’s presidential votes were tossed out that year.
The 1988 Texas ballot was screwed up, just as the Florida butterfly ballot was. The only reason the screwed-up Texas ballot never received any press is that Bush won Texas (and the election) by a landslide, so those few thousand votes didn’t matter much.
Keep this in mind when you observe the goings-on in Florida. The wonder is that major, CONSEQUENTIAL screw-ups don’t happen more often.