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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 23 - 29 November 2000 Issue No.509
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Electoral farce
By Ibrahim Nafie
Over two weeks have passed since American voters went to the polls on 7 November yet the results of the US presidential elections remain up in the air. Just as it appeared that the Republican candidate George W Bush had taken the state of Florida to become the next president, his Democratic rival, Al Gore, was alerted to possible irregularities in the Florida poll and demanded a recount. Suits and counter suits were filed in the Florida courts and may well wend their way to the federal courts. So instead of the customary self-congratulatory jubilation at yet another smooth test of their electoral system, pundits are now scrambling to understand what went wrong in order to provide answers to their perplexed and bemused critics.
US presidential elections have always been the focus of intense international concern. With the collapse of the Soviet Union they are, if anything, followed even more closely than before. In the past US elections had always furnished occasion for celebration in American embassies around the world, as well as for convocations of lectures and seminars in which hosts of experts would be summoned to explain the intricacies of the various phases, ethics and codes of etiquette of the US electoral process to the mystified. This is not the case with this year's elections.
Not that the current impasse had been anticipated. The presidential campaigns got off to their usual start with the party conventions and the selection of candidates. Eyes then turned to the selection of the vice-presidential candidates, which, this year, brought one unusual development. While Bush chose Dick Cheney, who had served as secretary of defence under his father and who conformed to the unwritten rule that presidential and vice-presidential candidates be white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as his running mate, Gore departed from the norm, choosing Joseph Lieberman, a Jew.
Gore's choice was informed by at least two considerations. Firstly, Lieberman was an outspoken critic of the scandals that marred Clinton's term in the Oval Office. By choosing him as his running mate Gore hoped to disassociate himself from that record and to furnish a ready answer to the anticipated Republican campaign to bring morals back into the White House.
The second consideration was to attract the Jewish vote, though some analysts predicted that the choice of Lieberman would work against Gore. The American public was not yet ready to break the WASP criterion, they argued, pointing to the controversy that occurred on the sole occasion when this rule was broken with the selection of Kennedy, a Catholic, as the 1960 Democratic candidate. Other analysts, however, argued that because as vice president Lieberman would, under certain circumstances, have a shot at the presidency, bringing a Jew into that position for the first time in US history, the US Jewish community would rally unanimously behind Gore. An opinion poll conducted by Newsweek did not bear out this prediction, however.
Apart from this minor departure from the routine, the presidential elections followed their usual course through the candidates' campaign trails and televised debates, all monitored by the swings in opinion polls. Then election day came and went, and the morning after everything ground to a halt.
All hinged on Florida. Before the results of that state were announced Bush was only some 200,000 votes ahead of Gore and it was clear that whoever took Florida would win the election. At first things proceeded normally. The results showed that Bush topped Gore by less than 300 votes, which paltry majority meant that Florida's electoral college votes would secure his victory. However, just before Gore was about to mount the podium in Nashville, Tennessee, to announce his defeat and congratulate the victor, his chief campaign adviser urged him to hold off because the margin was so close and there were suspicions of balloting irregularities.
Thus, for the first time in US history, a presidential candidate -- Gore -- called into question the election results and demanded a manual recount. From then on the process degenerated into law suits, mutual recriminations between the Gore and Bush camps, and total chaos.
The paralysis in the US electoral machinery naturally became the butt of jokes, even among the US's democratic allies. A Mickey Mouse elections, scoffed the British Daily Express. A German lawyer remarked: "The Americans are not as technologically advanced as they thought. They can't print reasonable ballots, they don't know how to fill them out properly and they can't count!"
Clearly, something is terribly amiss with the US polling system. Indeed, its deficiencies were observed long ago by the fathers of the US constitution who readily admitted that the system was not ideal. It is possible, for example, for a candidate to lose the popular vote but win the electoral race by securing a majority of the electoral college, which in fact occurred in 1824, 1876 and 1888.
The electoral college is a curious outcrop of the discrepancy between state and federal powers that has effected many other areas of American legislation. In effect, it is a form of indirect vote whereby each state is accorded a quota of electoral college delegates, that quota being determined by the number of the state's representatives in the House of Representatives and the Senate. When a presidential candidate wins the direct vote within a state he simultaneously wins that state's votes within the electoral college. The candidate that secures a simple majority in the electoral college wins the election, however the national popular vote might read.
Florida carries considerable electoral college weight. It is not surprising, then, that it should come under the spotlight in this neck-to-neck presidential race. It is also little wonder that the controversy over the hand recount is so heated and has the contestants scouring the books for legal precedents to support their positions. Thus, while the Democrats point to the Florida Supreme Court ruling of 1998 calling for the nullification of election results in the event of "reasonable doubt" that they do not reflect the will of the voters, the Republicans have focused on the US Supreme Court's ruling of 1997, upholding the federal law that stipulates that congressional and presidential elections must be held on the same day throughout the country.
As this controversy flares on, more and more shortcomings in the US electoral system are coming to light, putting paid to long held axioms about the clarity and consistency of the rules and procedures that govern it.
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