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THIS IS ONLY FAIR. And fairness should count for something. I spoke to a high school civics class this morning, and had a hard time trying to explain why, since I believe any fair and full counting of ballots will show that Gore won Florida and with it the White House, The system may not give us that full and fair counting. The best I could come up with is to remind the students of what President John F. Kennedy said, “Life is not fair.” JFK had been, as he memorably said of his generation, “tested in war, (and) tempered by a hard and bitter peace.” He had seen his brother killed in combat, his sister killed in a plane crash, his boat shot out from under him in the Pacific. And yet he knew some who’d emerged from the war unscathed — and others still who were never called to serve at all. His conclusion: life is not fair.
GET SOME PERSPECTIVE
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If every vote counts in Seminole and Martin Counties, they ought to count in the state’s other counties as well.
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For someone like me who has, thank God, never been asked to serve in combat, I lack JFK’s tough, but accurate, perspective. And, Lord knows, an election is not a war. No one will die. No one will be injured. No one will have their lives shattered. So, while this is definitely the biggest political story of my lifetime, Kennedy’s lesson has helped me put it into perspective.
Still, I am thrilled that the Florida Supreme Court has ordered a careful count of the disputed ballots. It would be even more fair to have, as Gore has suggested, a full recount of the entire state of Florida. But absent that, counting the disputed ballots may yield a victory for Gore — or it may yield a victory for Bush. But more fundamentally, the count will confer legitimacy. After all, when 6 million votes are cast but only 537 separate the winner from the loser, and tens of thousands of ballots have never been accurately read, it seems only fair to give those ballots a look-see.
EQUAL UNFAIRNESS?
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I know the system is not always fair. But it ought to be unfair to both parties in the same way. That is, if the GOP is going to tell hundreds of voters in Palm Beach County that their votes don’t count because their local canvassing board submitted the paperwork 127 minutes late, because the Supreme Court had said the Secretary of State could receive them the next morning. If we’re going to tell 20,000 citizens whose votes were invalidated by a flawed ballot, and thousands more whose votes were never counted because of flawed machines, and untold more whose votes were excluded because of a lack of translators for Haitian immigrants or because the needlessly complicated ballot confused a lot of first-time voters — if the Republicans’ answer to all of those people is, “Life is unfair,” why do they appeal to fundamental fairness to include thousands of ballots whose applications were tampered with by party operatives?
WATCH FOR ATTACKS
The twin-killing of the Seminole and Martin County cases makes sense when you consider the radical-and-unfair-nature of the remedy. Nobody wants to throw out the votes of thousands of citizens who did nothing wrong. Nobody but the Republicans, if those votes happen to be for Al Gore. By the same token, the Florida Supreme Court ruling makes sense. If every vote counts in Seminole and Martin Counties, they ought to count in the state’s other counties as well.
Watch for the Banana Republicans to attack the Court, just as Bush lawyer (and the man who ran the Willie Horton campaign for Poppy) James A. Baker called “unacceptable” the last Supreme Court ruling with which he disagreed. The Bushies will resort to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Florida Legislature, Tom DeLay and the right-wingers who run the GOP Congress. All Al Gore has on his side are the people, the votes and the law. It’s going to be one helluva fight.
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