Why police the polls? It's idiocy, not thuggery

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© St. Petersburg Times
published October 22, 2002

Like many of our neighbors here in the tropics and subtropics, we Floridians are a simple people with a worldwide reputation for good drugs, bad elections and just a teeny bit of political corruption.

People also disappear from here frequently in the middle of the night, but we suspect they are only moving to North Carolina for cooler temperatures and an occasional view of something other than road construction.

Still, have no fear. Apparently, even though we don't have oil or any large contracts with United Fruit, help is not far away.

If I was as conspiracy-phobic as some of my radical Democrat friends are, I would be listening for the buzz of black helicopters in the Florida skies.

On Oct. 18, one edition of the Times ran a front-page picture of brothers Jeb and George W. Bush embracing in Daytona Beach with a headline reading "Governor turns to White House for help."

The following day, we learned that U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft had agreed to provide civil rights monitors in several Florida counties during the November election. This at the request of Jeb Bush and Republican Secretary of State Jim Smith, who replaced former Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris -- who knows botched elections.

So state officials, who some Democrats firmly believe stole the 2000 presidential election, are getting help from the administration of the president those Democrats think the election was stolen for, at a time when his brother, who they think stole it for him, is facing a serious challenge from a Democrat.

Add that mentioning Ashcroft and civil rights in the same breath gives some of us a case of the terminal giggles and has others dusting off fox-and-henhouse analogies, and wondering aloud if there is any chance that Bill Clinton, as a gesture of bipartisanship, is soon to be placed in charge of the White House intern recruitment office.

And just in case you think the banana republic (the political entity, not the formerly cool clothing store) analogy is too much of a stretch, don't forget that Miami-Dade officials have hired outside election monitors from the Center for Democracy, which really does watch out for corruption and incompetence in Third World countries.

And we thought Jay Leno was being unfair with all of those cracks about Jimmy Carter going to Palm Beach County.

I am a native Floridian, and tired of the constant implications that our elections are fouled up by the kind of corruption that exists in countries where voters are afraid to go to the polls and ballot boxes are stuffed.

I am tired of us being placed in the same category as Iraq, where Hussein was re-elected 11,445,636 to 0 and the turnout was 100 percent, meaning that no registered voter that day was in a coma, overslept, had car trouble or failed to vote for some other reason. (Actually Hussein was a piker. The late Chicago Mayor Dick Daley -- not the incumbent, but his father -- would have seen to it that a enough dead people voted to kick that percentage up to around 103.)

I'm not saying we don't have a tiny bit of corruption here and there, but we are in the unusual situation of having most of our people move here from somewhere else, which means that even our crooks tend to be incompetent. Let's face it, if they were any good at it, they would be living in Aspen or Palm Springs.

In parts of our state (not here on the North Suncoast, of course) the problem isn't with people who stuff ballot boxes. It is with people who can't figure out how to turn on idiot-proof voting machines. (If they used ballot boxes, they would probably display them slot-side down and wonder why so few votes were cast.)

We don't have armed thugs showing up to intimidate people and scare them away from the polls. We have an entirely different breed of thug: election workers who don't bother to show up.

And we don't have a largely illiterate electorate unaware of the issues. We just have voters who can't figure out a ballot that wouldn't confuse a sharp second-grader and/or who can't tell the difference between Pat Buchanan and Al Gore. (A hint: Here lately Gore is the chunky one.)

We don't need policing. We need education. Yeah . . . charter schools . . . that's the ticket.

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