HOME / dialogues: E-mail debates of newsworthy topics.

What Now?

dialogues:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

From: Alan Brinkley
To: Michael McConnellPosted Thursday, Nov. 16, 2000, at 9:00 PM ET

Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and the author most recently of Liberalism and Its Discontents (click here to buy it). Michael McConnell is the Presidential Professor of Law at the University of Utah. Slate asked them to keep a running commentary on the presidential endgame.

RSS

Michael knows more about election law than I do, I'm sure. But much of this dispute is not about the law. It is about what seems to be fair. And I cannot accept Michael's logic that it is unfair to recount in counties that used punch cards (which everyone concedes produces more errors than other systems) simply because more such counties favored Gore. If there is unfairness here, it is that more Gore counties were likely to have undercounted than were Bush counties. Even the manufacturers of punch-card voting machines admit that such machines tend to undercount by as much as 10 percent; that is, they fail to read a tenth of the punched ballots. If the whole state used punch cards, one could reasonably argue that this doesn't matter, that the errors are spread randomly around the state. But that is not the case. When one candidate's votes seem much more likely to have been undercounted than do another candidate's, fairness seems to dictate a recount. Surely the standard should be which system will get us closer to the true vote of the electorate (and there is such a thing as the true vote, even if we may never know it with absolute certainty). It could well seem unfair to have hand counts only in Democratic counties, but that is not Gore's fault. The Bush campaign could have (and given Gore's offer today) still could ask for recounts in their counties too, and they should do so.

The Bush campaign's public argument centers less around the question of which counties are being reviewed, however, than around the question of whether a hand count is likely to be more accurate than a machine count. They insist that hand counts are chaotic, subjective, and inaccurate. But both Florida and Texas law say hand counting is the appropriate recourse to the limitations of machine voting. (I note, however, that they raised no objection to the hand count in New Mexico that, for a time at least, put them back in the lead.) It is hard to imagine that hand counting, which like any system can produce inaccuracies of its own, would replicate the very high level of inaccuracy in the machine counting of punch cards. Machine voting was not created to be more accurate than other systems; it was created to be faster. And in an election this close, accuracy should be more important than speed.

Having said all that, I think we have already gotten well beyond the point at which any likely solution to this controversy will be acceptable to both sides and thus beyond the point at which either candidate could hope to have a very good chance at a successful or productive presidency. Both campaigns have contributed to this fiasco through overblown rhetoric and excessive charges, as well as through what is already an enormous amount of litigation (begun, it should be noted, by the Bush campaign despite the earlier threat of it by the Gore people). But regardless of who is to blame, the prize for which everyone is still so desperately struggling seems to me now almost not worth winning.

What will history say about this election? When there are disputes of this kind around elections, the winner usually pays the higher price. Most treatments of the election of 1876, where there was fraud and chicanery on both sides, still see the loser, Samuel Tilden, as the injured party. Histories of the election of 1824 are generally not kind to the winner, John Quincy Adams, and of course Andrew Jackson, who lost that year and then defeated Adams in 1828, is now the much greater figure in our history. This is ironic in many ways. Tilden is an unlikely hero—a conservative Democrat who was supporting the efforts of white Democrats to deprive African-Americans of the vote in the South. (In fairness, Hayes, the victor, also sold out Southern black voters as the price of his victory.) Jackson, for all his greatness, was a ruthless and somewhat capricious leader with a record of exceptional savagery toward the Indian tribes—as compared with the sober, judicious, highly principled John Quincy Adams, who in most contexts would seem to us today to be the more appealing figure. I suppose it's too early for a potential president to be thinking of his legacy before he even knows if he's been elected; but in this case, the best protection of "the legacy" might be to lose.

The nearer-term consequences of this election are easier to predict. Whoever is elected will be able to get almost nothing through Congress that is not acceptable to both parties. (Given the virtual tie in Congress, that may have been true even without this debacle.) There will almost surely be no $1.3 trillion tax cut, no Social Security privatization, and no campaign-finance reform. If Bush wins, Democrats will likely win control of Congress in 2002. If Gore wins, Republicans are much more likely to retain it. Supreme Court nominations will be extremely difficult to get through if the candidate is any way controversial or suspect in the eyes of either side. I suspect the informal bar on filibusters for court nominees will soon be a thing of the past. The new president's best chance for legislative productivity would seem to be adopting the program of his opponent. It is not impossible that if Bush is elected he could decide that it was in his interest to adopt such generally popular Gore proposals as prescription drug benefits under Medicare and campaign-finance reform; or that if Gore is elected, he may embrace some portion of Bush's tax-cut proposal. But no one is going to make much progress on his own campaign agenda.

And what of the Electoral College? Had this election ended cleanly with the winner having lost the popular vote, I suspect we would have seen a powerful and perhaps irresistible movement to abolish the Electoral College. Florida, however, may prove to be, among other things, an important cautionary tale. With a 200,000-vote margin deciding an election among 100 million voters, it is easy to imagine a battle like the one in Florida taking place all over the nation. Perhaps there will now be second thoughts about changing the system.

We're a stable and healthy nation, and we can survive this imbroglio, just as we can survive a weak, perhaps even crippled presidency and a season of partisan fury. We survived the 104^th Congress and the impeachment struggle, after all. But I can't agree with Michael that we should be glad that this close election provides us with evidence of how strong our democracy is. Yes, it's better not to know who won two weeks after the election than to know who will win a year before, as in pre-Vicente Fox Mexico. But it's better still to have an election that ends in a way that gives the winner a reasonable shot at governing successfully. This election, however it ends, will not do that.

dialogues:
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32

From: Alan Brinkley
To: Michael McConnellPosted Thursday, Nov. 16, 2000, at 9:00 PM ET

E-MAIL

RECOMMEND... Get Slate RSS Feeds

Alan Brinkley is Allan Nevins Professor of History at Columbia University and the author most recently of Liberalism and its Discontents (click here to buy it). Michael McConnell is the Presidential Professor of law at the University of Utah. This week, Slate has asked them to keep a running commentary on the presidential endgame.

COMMENTS

Reader Comments from The Fray:

Michael McConnell argues that even a state-wide hand count might give Gore an unfair advantage, because the questionable punch card ballots were used predominantly in counties that heavily supported Gore. But his logic is flawed; he forgets that the argument for a hand recount--widespread undervoting that a human eye might correct--has already taken this very discrepancy into account. Though the hand recount would most likely discover a larger number of new votes for Gore than Bush because of the problems with punch cards, the inverse is true for the current machine count: Bush has been unfairly over-represented by his support in counties with more technologically advanced voting systems. It is not necessarily improper to concentrate energy on hand recounts in punch card counties, since they are the ones in which problems with unread votes are more likely. While I can't think of any serious argument against a state-wide hand count (except for the question about hand count subjectivity which might be dealt with by simple guidelines), the problem now is simply that the Republicans have argued for too long against hand counting at all, and are thus unable to concede this clear, proper compromise.

--Jared White

(To reply, click here.)

I believe that the hand recount is conducted, ballot by ballot, with a representative of both political parties, both of whom must agree on the party for whom each vote was cast. Any ballot that the two person team does not agree on is then reviewed by a three member panel of non-partisans. My point is simply that the recount is not a subjective as one might think. Since one of the candidates campaigned on the slogan that he "trusts the people" and the other has indicated a willingness to trust the people on this issue, I am surprised there is a problem.

--Carrie McLain

(To reply, click here.)

A way out: the Burr-Hamilton solution.

--APM

(To reply, click here.)

(11/15)

Reader Comments from The Fray:

I find it amusing that the Democrats are telling President-elect Bush that the only way he can succeed is to adopt their agenda.

The popular vote, as close as it was, could have swung Bush's way if it was recounted as Florida was. If California and all the voter irregularity in the excessively liberal and populous states were taken out of the picture, the popular vote across the nation was significantly more for Bush. It presents a more accurate picture of America as a whole to view the popular vote minus California. That's the reason for the Electoral College.

Democrats should be looking and asking themselves why they blew this election rather than deluding themselves that it was stolen. Look within. The liberal lies and scare-mongering, and class warfare language and willingness to depart from the law in order to win at any costs is not going to serve America or the Democratic party well. When America has more time to reflect on the days since the election, the Democrats will not fare so well. That is why the Democrats are trying still to deflect attention from their failures.

Vice-President Gore gave a noble speech last night. For the first time in this election process I gained respect for him. He was finally speaking honestly. Liberals should try honesty instead of distortion and manipulation more often.

--Mark Sherman

(To reply, click here.)

Sorry, but I don't see true bipartisanship happening. The division you see has been growing for decades. It isn't between skinheads or klansmen and 'good honest Americans,' it is between those who are willing to be responsible for themselves, and those who've been inculcated with the idea that they have a god-given right to the fruits of someone else's labor. The Dems have done the indoctrinating, and those of us who flocked to the personal freedom stances of 60's Democratic candidates are appalled at how the current flock of Democrat candidates have taken full advantage of the 'buy a vote with welfare' techniques they've developed over the years. I have predicted class warfare by 2010 since 1975. I may be off a couple years, but dramatic changes are in order

--Dennis Jacques

(To reply, click here.)
Â

Reader Comments from The Fray:

I disagree that what the Supreme Court faces is less compelling than Dred Scott. It's time to get past all this rhetoric and look at what we, as citizens, are being dealt. First of all, forget all the pious cant about the wisdom of the founding fathers. The Constitution was never a document that guaranteed democracy in this country, since the founding fathers' didn't want democracy. They didn't want people to be able to vote for the president, that was the job for politicians. Jefferson himself wrote "the people is an ass." While they may have been against British rule, they were in no shape or form democrats in light of the term today. And the Republicans are not such great believers in democracy today. If they were, they would have worked to get an accurate count in Florida. The Supremes are either going to yank us into the present, for those "asses" like myself, of haul us back into the past. That is the Constitutional issue at stake.

--George Grella

(To reply, click here.)

As we await the Supreme Court's decision, I stand astonished. Not that the Supreme Court delved into the 'miasma' of this election dispute--it is not such a bad idea for the last word of the land to have the last word; what astonished me was Scalia's stated reason for the stay granted. The stay itself was not such a bad idea (I voted for Gore, by the way). The decision needed to be made before there were facts on the ground so that no one felt any more robbed than they already do. However, Scalia's unprecedented indication that he has already made up his mind before even receiving a brief must have ruffled some of his colleague's feathers and perhaps created an environment that may well send the 'swing justices'--Kennedy and O'Connor--into the arms of the solid opposition. Scalia's statement may well turn out to be a self-fulfilling anti-prophecy.

It would be most astonishing if any decision were 5 to 4. I think it is more likely that there will be a more solid majority behind some sort of solomonic solution. One hopes that the court will be very, very cautious not to create law itself.

--Rabbi Jason

(To reply, click here.)

In our world of constant disorder, why is it so surprising that the old technology-based society is colliding with the new tech order? We are transforming our entire society to the new tech order. Many systems have not made the transition. Voting processes and systems are at the top of the list right now. This collision must take place and the new tech order take its proper place in this function of our society. Laws must change to support the new order. For now, the courts must decide the outcome based on our current technology and laws. We must invest the next four years and make our voting systems capable of supporting our transforming society, and build new law in this process.

--Steve R

(To reply, click here.)

(12/11)

What did you think of this article?

Join The Fray: Our Reader Discussion Forum

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES