Mr. Gore wants 10,000 invalid ballots counted ... for him
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED NOV. 30, 2000
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
Mr. Gore wants 10,000 invalid ballots counted ... for him
There are more than 10,000 votes in South Florida that have never been counted," Connecticut Sen. (and Democratic vice presidential hopeful) Joseph Lieberman said on TV Tuesday morning. Mr. Lieberman was following up on Al Gore's nationally televised explanation of his unprecedented legal challenge to George W. Bush's now-certified presidential victory in Florida.
Other members of the Gore propaganda team made the same claim on other networks, with only slight variations in phrasing.
"This is America," the vice president said in his address to the American people, aired just before the Monday night football game to maximize audience numbers. "When votes are cast, we count them. We don't arbitrarily set them aside because it's too difficult to count them."
Yet this is the same Al Gore who has moved heaven and earth to have thousands of military absentee ballots disqualified -- that is to say, to keep them from being counted -- under a Florida law which the Gore forces interpret to mean such ballots must be "postmarked" by election day.
No, most of these military ballots do not bear "postmarks." Sailors on duty in the Mediterranean or the Persian Gulf have few opportunities to paddle ashore in little rubber dinghies and have some Iranian or Turkish postmaster do them the favor of date-stamping their envelopes. However, the military ballots were gathered up in official armed forces mailbags on or before Election Day. And under federal law, that means they should be counted.
Is Mr. Gore saying it's "too difficult" to count the clearly marked ballots of these American citizens, away from hearth and home due to his own administration's foreign policy? Or does he merely realize that -- after eight years of watching the current administration turn our once-proud armed forces into an ongoing experiment in social manipulation -- the military ballots have been running 3-to-2 for Mr. Bush?
To say that there are 10,000 ballots in south Florida which have "never been counted" implies some evil Republican operative has salted away boxes containing that many unopened, unexamined ballots in some cellar or swamp. In fact, the Gore forces have requested recounts only in heavily Democratic counties, where local election officials are almost entirely members of Mr. Gore's own party. The ballots in question have been run twice through their counting machines and rejected. The Democratic canvassing board in Dade County then voted unanimously not to count those ballots a third time -- that is, not to play Karnak the Magnificent, holding them up to their turbaned foreheads and trying to psychically divine each anonymous voter's "intent."
Mr. Gore simply doesn't like the fact that no matter how many times his counters have squeezed and tapped these ballots, they can't get enough of the little chads next to Mr. Gore's name to pop out -- or manage to replace the chad for the second candidate in the same race which a few thousand voters inadvertently punched out, thus invalidating their votes in that race.
The time has come to point out our emperor's nakedness. The "10,000 votes that have never been counted" is more than just a carefully crafted public-relations phrase. It is a lie.
No one has been able to find any mass of Florida ballots that were carefully secreted away and never counted in order to deny Al Gore this election. Every year, the ballots of tens of thousands of voters in every state go untallied in specific races, because they fail for any number of reasons to punch one and only one hole for one and only one candidate. Yet Mr. Gore's new-found enthusiasm for reconstructing such invalid votes does not seem to extend to the 26,000 ballots which were similarly disqualified in heavily Republican Duval County -- or to New Mexico or Iowa or Wisconsin, for that matter, all of which went by paper-thin margins to Mr. Gore, instead of Mr. Bush.
If Mr. Gore would like to head up a special commission to reform voting and ballot-counting procedures in America, let him have at it. The reliability and accuracy of the old Vote-a-Matic machines since rejected by other jurisdictions (including Nevada) but still in use in South Florida may well be worth examining, as is the apparent inability to conduct a "hard" recount of "ballots" which exist as nothing but electronic impulses in more "modern" devices based on 1970s electronic technology, like our own Sequoia Pacific machines.
Heck, if Mr. Gore wants to examine the potential tyranny of allowing incumbent interests to control whose names go on the ballot in the first place -- the system known as "the Australian ballot" when first brought to this country more than a century ago -- instead proposing a return to ballots hand-written or pre-printed by the parties, setting aside two months after each election for a laborious hand count in every precinct in the land (perhaps the Boy Scouts would lend a hand), then let him make his case. It's increasingly apparent he'll need something to do for the next few years.
But such reforms need to be debated long before they go into effect -- not adopted after the final buzzer has sounded.
Instead, Mr. Gore acts today like the sore loser who, having lost a close contest to an opponent who kicked a dozen field goals, whines, "We gained more total yardage. It's not fair to let them win the game when they never scored a touchdown. Touchdowns are at least three times as hard to score as field goals. We should change it so field goals only count for two points."
As public support for his antics and tantrums erodes, it becomes less and less likely Mr. Gore will ever set Tipper's picture on that desk in the Oval Office. Instead, the current Democratic maneuverings are increasingly designed to undermine the legitimacy of a Bush presidency -- a battle which will continue as congressional Democrats lash themselves to the mast and obstruct any GOP effort to cut taxes or streamline Washington's Byzantine bureaucracy, shrieking at the top of their lungs that "Bush has no mandate! They want to starve the chilllllldren!"
If the Democrats are now reduced to gutter politics, fighting a desperate holding action to defend their cushy government jobs and bureaucratic turf, this should come as no surprise.
What's offensive is that they have to be so sanctimonious about it.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas Review-Journal. His book, "Send in the Waco Killers: Essays on the Freedom Movement, 1993-1998," is available by dialing 1-800-244-2224.
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong. The minority are right." -- Eugene V. Debs (1855-1926)
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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