Sit Down in the Front of the Bus to Fix the Nation’s Election System

“Idon’t know and I don’t care who won,” Ion Sancho, the Democratic supervisor of elections in Florida’s Leon County, told a reporter Tuesday. “To know that we held an election and did not count all the votes and now to be told by the [U.S.] Supreme Court that we cannot count them is, to me, a travesty.”

To me, too. This election wasn’t for the U.S. Supreme Court or the lawyers to decide, and it wasn’t Al Gore’s to decide Wednesday night either, not even with his surreally gracious concession speech. I say surreally because realism demands that we count all the ballots, even though Gore is ready to “accept the finality of this outcome.”

And, no matter what the pundits and politicians tell us, George W. Bush’s legitimacy crisis won’t be settled any other way.

I had a civil disobedience fantasy as early as last Saturday, when Pam Iorio, elections supervisor of Florida’s Hillsborough County, cheerfully told CNN that her canvassing board hadn’t stopped its recount when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its stay. Her board had taken a little extra time to separate all the “undervote” ballots, the better to count them expeditiously should the count resume.

I began wondering what would happen had some of the canvassers just kept right on counting. Suppose they were to resume even right now, on the grounds that, after all the litigation and politicking have spun webs of partisan obfuscation, only the ballots have enough credibility to save the system from its official guardians. Sure, last week’s recount process was flawed. But it had a lot more “equal protection” in it than the Nov. 7 election. It was getting us closer to the truth we’d need to live with ourselves and with a President Bush.

That’s why the nation’s highest court should have stayed itself last week, not the recount. It’s not that Republicans who have gained from the court’s intervention are worse than Democrats. Years ago, watching black Democrats fight other black Democrats over congressional primary results that took New York’s highest court to resolve, I learned that politicians of any color or persuasion will try to leapfrog democracy when majorities get slim. Even well-meaning public officials sometimes need to be shamed into seeing that only the ballots hold the truth. Could the U.S. Supreme Court or the Florida Legislature have faced down the spectacle of sheriff’s deputies or state police carting citizens away from ballot-counting?

I doubt it. When a black department store worker named Rosa Parks found the courage to refuse to move to the back of a segregated public bus in 1955, she broke the law and defied social convention. By accepting legal punishment, she upheld the principle of law with self-discipline and humility. Her protest embraced and elevated her society instead of trashing it as inherently damned.

Only civil disobedience can do that when the system is down. It takes even the most well-meaning political leaders and pundits by surprise, as it did in the civil rights movement. Sometimes it just falls to ordinary citizens to dare to speak for what is best, if dormant, in the rest of us. And thus the system opens to a larger truth.

It’s time for small “d” democrats and small “r” republicans to stand up and be counted. Let Bush, Gore and the justices wait a little longer. Too late for that, you say? Then they are going to be waiting a lot longer for most voters’ genuine respect.