Legislators’ Responsibility

Even Americans who are following the Florida voting controversy avidly are likely to be confused as court filings proliferate, lawyers debate the meaning and intent of ambiguous laws and round-the-clock partisan cannonading saturates the airwaves. Today the speculation can be expected to go to fever pitch as the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments in a portion of the historic legal dispute over who won the 2000 presidential election.

To further confuse matters, Florida’s Republican-dominated Legislature is preparing to convene a special session to name its own pro-George W. Bush slate. That sets up the possibility that the Legislature could attempt to nullify the will of the electorate, should a recount give Florida, and the presidency, to Al Gore.

The legislators should not be so eager to make history--or to ignite a potential crisis. They are required to act only if there is no conclusion in the courts by Dec. 12, the date set for states to choose their electors. To act before then would only be politically provocative or, worse, irresponsible.

The central question is still a simple one: Were all the nearly 6 million ballots that were cast in Florida Nov. 7 fairly counted?

The Gore campaign wants the courts to recognize that question’s legal primacy and agree that many votes--perhaps enough to change the outcome of the election--were not accurately tallied. To remedy this the Gore team wants manual recounts of ballots rejected by fallible counting machinery. The Bush campaign insists the matter has already been settled by county election boards and Florida’s secretary of state; the outcome, with Bush winning Florida by 537 votes, must be accepted as valid. Ultimately the courts or possibly even Congress will decide between these competing claims. But that won’t necessarily answer the question of whether the intentions of Florida’s voters were accurately registered.

It is indisputable that a lot of votes were not counted, not because of a criminal conspiracy but as a consequence of mechanical failures. Many punch-card ballots were invalidated because the machines through which they were run couldn’t determine voters’ intent from holes that were only partially punched through. The disparity between the small percentage of presidential votes rejected in counties where optical scanning devices counted ballots and the high percentage rejected in counties using punch cards is striking evidence of the shortcomings of punch-card voting.

Time is not on the side of the effort to get a fair count of machine-rejected ballots. The courts should recognize both the compelling claims made for manual recounts of these ballots and the urgent necessity to act quickly, to meet the Dec. 12 deadline.

There is no need to recount every ballot cast, an option raised earlier by Florida’s Supreme Court and rejected by both parties. But if democracy is to be respected, the intent of voters must also be respected as fully and fairly as possible by both the courts and the Florida Legislature.