Blame It on the Butterfly

The election on Tuesday continues to provide some of the highest American political drama since Watergate. Despite ignorant, self-serving calls from the Democrats (and many Greens) for an abolition of the electoral college, the real culprit of all this confusion is a bit more pedestrian and far less politically exploitable. There is a Rosetta stone, a key to explaining the whole damnably confusing mess: the Florida butterfly ballot. Stay with me, because I won't be able to explain this twice...

After the media outlets called Pennsylvania for Gore on Tuesday night, I thought that Gore had the election locked up. He'd already taken Florida and Michigan; and the only way Bush could win was to capture nearly every Western state, which wasn't reasonable to expect. I don't generally think the corporate media does a very good job with federal elections, if for no other reason than that their reliance on the exit poll consortium (composed of the AP and major networks) and the Voter News Service makes for analysis that's as blandly consistent as gloppy wheat paste. Tuesday night's coverage on CNN and NBC was awful as one might suspect.

But then, in a scene redolent of 1948, the networks put Florida "back into play," as the self-appointed insiders, pols and pros like to say (a horrid little phrase). Florida wasn't solidly Gore's after all, in part because, as the vampyric Karl Rove (Bush's inner circle tough guy) said later, some heavily Democratic areas were still out, namely Dade and Broward counties. So, as everyone knows by now, the rest of the night was a lot closer. Florida and Oregon and Wisconsin were too close to call. At this point, to be the next president, Bush or Gore has to win Florida, where a recount is proceeding.

But the interpretive key of this tale of madness is the special butterfly ballot that was (ill) prepared for some voters in Florida. Careful observers of American federal elections know that broad demographic shifts often influence or determine outcomes -- we're in the midst of one presently as Hispanic Americans went fairly heavily for Democrats on Tuesday. But one is hard-pressed to recall a demographic influence being so pointed and, well, strange as the geriatric butterfly in Florida on Tuesday.

Older Floridians, of which there are legions, were given a butterfly ballot, so-called because rather than having a single column of candidates (and punch-holes or inking-targets), it has three columns -- two of candidates and one of punch-holes right down the middle. The intent was to prepare a ballot that was easier for poorly sighted folks to comprehend. It led to disaster.

Apparently 22,000 old folks in Florida couldn't identify this butterfly, or were too scared, confused, or timid to ask for help, and so either voted for two candidates or voted for Pat Buchanan. There may be as many as 19,000 of the former and about 3,000 of the latter.

It's reasonable to expect that of those 22,000 votes, had the ballot been legible, most would have been cast for Gore. Further, the network analysts who originally called Florida for Gore clearly took this block of Gore votes in Palm Beach into account in their predictive models of the state. As much as I love to hate the corporate media, on Tuesday night, it appears that their predictions were more accurate than the reality we presently face, a strange inversion indeed. If the designers (and bipartisan certifiers) of the butterfly ballot had done their jobs properly, 22,000 old Floridians would have voted intelligibly, and Gore's margin among them would have made this recount unnecessary. (Someone send them a copy of Don Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and a usability testing primer.) We would have had on Tuesday what we do not yet have: a President elect.

As things stand Gore is not the President elect and neither is Bush. No matter who leads after the recount, we won't have a President elect for at least ten days. If Bush leads after the recount, Gore (or private citizens) will challenge the butterfly ballot -- with no little justification. If Gore leads after the recount, Bush will demand that we wait until all the overseas absentee ballots have been gathered and counted -- again, with no little justification. (And Bush may challenge the butterfly ballot as well, or the private citizens may do so no matter what.)

If, at the time fixed for the beginning of the term of the President, the President elect shall have died, the Vice President elect shall become President. If a President shall not have been chosen before the time fixed for the beginning of his term, or if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified. -- U.S. Constitution, 25th Amendment

If the 22,000 butterfly ballots are challenged in court (by any party), it's going to take months to sort things out -- and the best legal remedy is unclear: state-wide special election, butterfly ballot voter special election only, split the butterfly ballot votes, etc. One doesn't prudently expect a judicial miracle: the challenge is likely to be fiercely adversarial if the Republicans have any formal standing at all. A resolution by 21 December -- when the electoral college meets -- is unlikely. Section 3 of the 25th amendment provides nicely for such an occasion. Congress picks a President more or less pro tempore until the Florida legal challenge is completed.

As a Nader voter, and a scorner of Gore and Bush administrations equally, I'm pleased with the absences not having a President elect has provided: an absence of victory celebrations, an absence of wails of faux defeat, and, most of all, an absence of anticipatory agenda-setting. From the left perspective, no matter who wins, the poor and marginalized will lose, Iraqi children will lose (by dying their horrible, preventable deaths), the victims of the war on drugs lose. That little ill-conceived butterfly may have done more to weaken the next administration than Nader or the Greens. The idea of a weak, grid locked administration warms me to my leftist bones.

Niel Bornstein and Bijan Parsia contributed to this piece.