Trouble is all around, but only we are blamed

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By HOWARD TROXLER

© St. Petersburg Times, published November 15, 2000

New Mexico owes us one for taking the full rap on this. So do Iowa, Wisconsin and Oregon.

It is Florida, and not any of these other states, that is now the national poster child for election trouble. Our state (to hear the rest of the nation tell it) is the banana republic here.

In New Mexico, of course, the vote count veers back and forth. State police have impounded ballots in all 33 counties. In Dona Ana County, a clerk "misread" 600 votes for Al Gore as 100 votes, apparently enough to swing the entire state back to Gore in the Electoral College. (By the way, one tied election in New Mexico last year was decided by a hand of poker. An ace-high flush won.)

In Wisconsin, almost one in five Marquette University students surveyed admitted voting twice, sometimes both in person and by absentee ballot. In Milwaukee, a Gore supporter may face charges for bribing homeless voters with cigarettes.

In Iowa, Bush keeps wriggling closer. One Iowa county "lost" 890 Gore voters in a recount because of a "data entry problem on election night." Several New Hampshire towns forgot to turn in their straight-party-line votes, and in one, the reported number of votes was 100 percent of the number of registered voters. In St. Louis, polls in Democratic precincts were kept open after hours. In Oregon, they're still trying to figure out who won its vote-by-mail election.

It is more than a week since the election, and the state of Washington still does not know the identity its next U.S. senator. Neither Minnesota nor New Jersey are quite sure of all their congressional races. Are they banana republics, too? Is their system broken?

Yet a Democrat named Daley from Chicago -- Daley from Chicago! -- has traveled to Florida to instruct us on honest elections. Meanwhile, Republicans -- Republicans! -- are trying to get the federal courts to take over. The newspapers in New York (a state that, until recently, had a more unfair ballot access than, say, Communist China) are having a field day.

The point: Florida did not invent the hanging chad. Everything that has happened in Florida since last Tuesday has happened according to Florida law. The first recount was required. Each county then had the option, if asked, of conducting a manual recount. The Republican lawsuit in federal court to block manual counts was offensive precisely because it tried to trample that law.

Our Republican secretary of state, Katherine Harris, is now a living proof of bias for the Democrats and much of the national media. Why? Because she interpreted Florida law as setting a 5 p.m. Tuesday deadline for vote counts.

How could Harris reach such a crazy, wicked, biased conclusion? I dunno -- maybe because that is a fair reading of state law. A circuit judge in Tallahassee, who was appointed by a Democratic governor, agreed with her on Tuesday. This Democratic appointee ruled that the law, "by its plain meaning," means what Harris said it meant, although he left the door open for her to allow manual recounts.

There will soon be a point at which Florida law is exhausted. After that, the Democrats will have to ask the state courts, and the Republicans the federal courts, to concoct some extra-legal remedy. It hardly seems gracious for them to be trying to run over the law in Florida while simultaneously blasting us for being lawless rubes. But each side has a vested interest in delegitimizing Florida's process just in case it is the side that ends up with fewer votes.

On top of that, the portrayal of this process has been influenced by the fact that the national networks twice announced the outcome of our election, and twice were wrong. This was all the proof the networks needed of banana-republic-hood: It was not their fault.

Here is the right thing to happen now. Once the overseas absentee voters are counted at the end of this week, the candidate with the fewer votes in Florida should concede. Then everybody who does not live here should go home.

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