Nobody wins in the US polls

GOP leaders went to enormous lengths to undo the results, right up to the electoral college that certified Kennedy as the winner by 303 electoral votes to 219…The effort was prodigious. Recounts were won in Illinois and New Jersey. There was some fraud, but not enough proven to change the outcome. In Illinois, the final recount showed that Kennedy’s 8,858 majority had been overcounted by 943, but in 40 per cent of precincts checked Nixon’s vote was found to have been overcounted. That is quite a contrast with Florida today where the contested Bush majority of 1,784 has dwindled to an unofficial 327, where absentee votes remain to be counted, and where the protests of 20,000 disenfranchised voters in Palm Beach County are of an altogether different order to 1960.

Both sides today have legitimate grievances. The Bush campaign is justified in its complaint that Republican voters may have been deterred from going to the polls by the reckless prediction of the TV networks that Gore had already won Florida. They would be entitled to seek recounts in other close races in other states. And the Gore campaign is right to insist on manual recounts in various counties in Florida. It has a duty to do that. Yes, we all know that every election has some mix-up or other, but this one affects so many thousands of voters. It is bizarre that the Republicans and so many commentators are acting as if these citizens are eccentric nuisances for insisting on the basic principle of American democracy. The consternation should be instead focused on why Bush is trying to claim the presidency before he has won it, an impudence incited but not justified by Gore’s stupidly premature concession. And how dare Bush oppose the principle of manual recounting when he himself signed that very procedureinto Texas law?

Excerpted from `Quite wrong about Nixon’, `The Guardian’, November 13

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