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Subject: Al Gore really did beat George W. Bush in 2000
From Research in Review Magazine, Florida State
University, Fall/Winter 2005:
Battlefield Florida
A Chat with Lance deHaven-Smith
Al Gore really did beat George W. Bush in 2000. Six
years on, this is still a problem?
by Julian Pecquet
After spending 36 days in the fall of 2000 in thrall
to politicians, pundits and the press, Americans
probably thought they knew all about the hanging,
dangling and pregnant chads that helped decide the
presidential election.
Turns out, those chads only distracted attention from
much more grievous breakdowns during the 2000
election.
At least thats what longtime Florida political
observer Lance deHaven-Smith believes. His most recent
book, The Battle for Florida (University Press of
Florida, 2005), looks at the twilight of democracy in
Ancient Greece and draws disturbing parallels with the
institutions in Florida and the nation during the 2000
election and up until today.
For the past 25 years, deHaven-Smith has been one of
just a handful of observers of Floridas elections and
politics. And while most of his colleagues dont go as
far as he does in finding fault with Floridas elected
officials, none question his stature as respected
researcher who can be counted on to provide the press
with timely and pithy appraisals of just about any
development in the colorful world of Florida politics.
For this book (his ninth), deHaven-Smith compiled
legal documents, statistical analyses and public
records, and flavored them with his interpretation of
what it all means.
Despite having grown up in the SouthdeHaven-Smith
lived between Florida and Georgia until his departure
for graduate studies at Ohio Statehis expertise in
the Sunshine States election trends was greatly a
matter of chance.
In 1981, the year he came down to teach at Florida
Atlantic, the young political scientist was one of the
nations top experts on a massive training program for
poor people until one fell flick of a bureaucratic pen
in Washington changed their life, and his.
It eliminated my subject matter, he says, laughing
now. I started studying Florida public opinion and
politics. I had gone to Ohio State, which is a big
school in voting research and public opinion research,
but it was all at the national level.
The other fortuity was that he came down to Florida in
the first place.
I had another job offer at Case Western in
Cleveland, he says, and then I went down to
interviewthis was in Boca Raton. It was in February.
They took me to breakfast at a hotel where we ate
outside by the intracoastal canal. I mean, it was
right in the middle of winter, Ohio weather was
terrible, and there I was, outside. So, sign me up.
There, he immersed himself in Florida politics, under
the tutelage of the famed John DeGrove, a nationally
recognized expert in growth management.
DeHaven-Smith moved on to FSU in 1994, where he headed
the Reuben Askew School of Public Administration and
Policy from 1995 to 1998.
Research in Review caught up with the professor while
he was waiting for people to check out his bookand
simultaneously sighing in relief that its hardly
garnered any attention, yet.
I think if it would have come out a year earlier, it
would have, he says. Im kind of glad it didnt,
though, because of all the right-wing critics. J.P.
RinR: One of the most interesting points you make in
the book is that the focus on undervotes (ballots
containing no vote for president)the hanging, dimpled
and otherwise pregnant chadswas misplaced. Instead,
you explain that a study by the National Opinion
Research Center at the University of Chicago, which
looked at all the ballots that were initially rejected
on election night 2000, revealed a surprise: most of
these uncounted votes were in fact discarded because
they were over-votes, instances of two votes for
president on one ballot. What do you think the NORC
study tells us about the election?
LdHS: Its an embarrassing outcome for George Bush
because it showed that Gore had gotten more votes.
Everybody had thought that the chads were where all
the bad ballots were, but it turned out that the ones
that were the most decisive were write-in ballots
where people would check Gore and write Gore in, and
the machine kicked those out. There were 175,000 votes
overall that were so-called spoiled ballots. About
two-thirds of the spoiled ballots were over-votes;
many or most of them would have been write-in
over-votes, where people had punched and written in a
candidates name. And nobody looked at this, not even
the Florida Supreme Court in the last decision it made
requiring a statewide recount. Nobody had thought
about it except Judge Terry Lewis, who was overseeing
the statewide recount when it was halted by the U.S.
Supreme Court. The write-in over-votes have really not
gotten much attention. Those votes are not ambiguous.
When you see Gore picked and then Gore written in,
theres not a question in your mind who this person
was voting for. When you go through those, theyre
unambiguous: Bush got some of those votes, but they
were overwhelmingly for Gore. For example, in an
analysis of the 2.7 million votes that had been cast
in Floridas eight largest counties, The Washington
Post found that Gores name was punched on 46,000 of
the over-vote ballots it, while Bushs name was marked
on only 17,000.
RinR: For your research, you merged this set of data
with detailed profiles of Floridas electoral
precincts. What did you find?
LdHS: One of the things I found that hadnt been
reported anywhere is, if you look at where those votes
occurred, they were in predominantly black precincts.
And (when you look at) the history of black voting in
Florida, these are people that have been
disenfranchised, intimidated. In the history of the
early 20th century, black votes would be thrown out on
technicalities, like they would use an X instead of a
check mark.
So you can understand why African Americans would be
so careful, checking off Gores name on the list of
candidates and also writing Gores name in the space
for write-in votes. But because of the way the
vote-counting machines work, this had the opposite
effect: the machines threw out their ballots.
RinR: One of the reasons, you argue, that the most
popular candidate ended up losing the election is
because so many Americans favored partisan rhetoric
over an unbiased search for truth during the recounts
in 2000. How do you explain this?
LdHS: As far as I can tell, its the way societies
work. One of the things weve learned with public
opinion research, the most fundamental finding of
public opinion research of the past 50 years is that
the masses follow the elites.
Most people dont have time to learn about all these
things, and they look to a particular person that they
trust. It may not be the president, it may be Jesse
Jackson, you know, it could be Rush Limbaugh, it could
be somebody whos not in government, but they look at
that person and defer to that person. Its a normal
thing.
I dont see that changing. It really is a matter of
elites being willing to be committed to democracy and
the rule of law and the rule of reason.
RinR: And this can be a problem because?
LdHS: Unfortunately, the history of democracy is that
leadership philosophy is eroded as the competition
between elites becomes more intense. Thats what
happened with Athenian democracy; thats what happened
in the Roman Republic. So you look at our system
today; you see our elites doing it, and you know were
in big trouble. Its in my lifetime that this has
happened, that elites have begun to put winning ahead
everything else, ahead of truth and country.
When Watergate was prosecuted, there were Republicans
in Congress that were after Nixon. They thought what
he was doing was unconscionable, and today thats not
the case. Today, Democrats stick with Democrats, and
Republicans stick with Republicans. They dont care
what their party leaders have done.
Just in my lifetime, Ive seen this civic culture go
from something thats respectful of democracy to
something that is manipulative of it.
The problem is if you let this go uncorrected, the
Democrats are going to do something worse later, and
then the Republicans. Its just an arms race almost,
and it will just tend to degenerate.
RinR: How does the 2000 election fit into that view?
LdHS: I think my book is at times rather blunt about
the illegalities I think that were committed and the
political motives that ran rampant.
I wish I could say, Well, well leave it alone; we
wont look at it because it would shake peoples
confidence in our society. But Im afraid the elite
discourseunless its corrected, unless elites start
recognizing that they have a responsibility to
maintain a democracy among themselveswere going to
have a big problem.
RinR: So, whats the overarching theme of The Battle
for Florida?
LdHS: It really tells a simple story in some ways. It
essentially says that the people responsible for
administering the election had a conflict of interest
and that they, in a variety of ways, prevented the
recount from being conducted.
I go into explaining why would it operate like this?
One factor that drove it this way is essentially that
the Republicans are on the losing side of a huge
demographic trend in this state: an increasing
minority population. And they know thisits not a
secret.
One reason there was administrative sabotage of the
recount was because a number of steps had already been
taken to try to lock in the Republican control of
Florida in the face of these demographics that are
running in the other direction.
The other thing the book looks at, in addition to the
long history leading up to this event, is also what
came out afterwards, what was done, were problems
corrected, what investigations were conducted? And the
story there is, gee, there was really very little
investigation, amazingly little, given the importance
of the election and the controversy.
Frankly, I would never have written this book had
there been any careful investigation done afterwards.
That was what shook me after the election, I was
expecting people would go into it, find out what had
happened and straighten out the problems so it
wouldnt happen again.
RinR: But Floridas 2001 Election Reform Act has been
described as a model for the nation. They banned the
punch cards; they gave $6 million for voter education;
and theyre requiring computer systems to let voters
know, once theyre in the booth, if theyve voted too
many times or failed to cast a valid vote. Are you
saying those changes are just cosmetic?
LdHS: They were worse than cosmetic. They focused on
the technology, which was not the real problem. The
problem was you just had partisans running the system
at every level, even on the Supreme Court. It was
everywhere. So if you wanted to correct this system,
youve got to get that partisanship out of the
process. And that was not done.
And the touch-screen systemits a terrible thing
thats being done with this technology, because you
cant double-check it. You have no paper trail on it.
RinR: Arent the new machines supposed to let you know
if you didnt cast a valid vote?
LdHS:: No, thats one of the problems. Its obviously
not letting people know. There was a special election
in the spring, where only one contest was on the
ballot. I think it was the spring of 2004, in Palm
Beach County where several hundred voters came and
turned in ballots that didnt register a vote.
[Robert] Wexler, a congressman there, sued to try to
get the touch-screen machines either decertified or
require a paper ballot because he said, People arent
going to come out for this one thing and not cast a
vote.
It shows that the machines have got a problem. But the
state wouldnt act.
RinR: Theres been a profusion of books and essays
already written about the election. What do you bring
to the table?
LdHS: For one thing, I study Florida politics and know
the law. Id been director of the local government
commission several years earlier, which looks at all
the local governments and how theyre staffed, how
theyre organized, what their financing is.
I had also been the executive director of the cabinet
reform commission in 1996. What both of those
commissions ended up exposing was a fairly arcane,
poorly understood cabinet system and
inter-governmental system that is really how our
elections are run, how our law-enforcement policies
are implemented, road planning, things like
thatthings people dont think that much about.
So I knew about all that. I was in Tallahassee. I got
to watch a lot of the election controversy itself. And
I had the political science background on the
demographic trends, the election trends. So I really
had a unique combination of background experiences and
subject matter expertise and then plain old luck in
being in the capital city of the state where it
happened.
RinR: Throughout the book, you repeat that Floridas
election lawespecially the rule that no vote shall
be declared invalid or void if there is a clear
indication of the intent of the voteis in fact much
more straightforward than was made out during the
controversy. So then, who do you fault the most for
making it all seem so murky?
LdHS: I would say [then-Secretary of State] Katherine
Harris in terms of murkyin terms of what the law
intended and what it meant. There was a contradiction
in the law. What it said was you have to get the
recount done within a very short time, and it just
wasnt possible. But thats not uncommon. You just
have to interpret it with common sense.
Part of what was going on was the stakes were really
high; the people involved were very inexperienced;
Harris didnt know [Attorney General Bob] Butterworth;
they were not cordial. But if it had been a group of
leaders who had been around for a while, they would
have sat down and easily said, Well, heres a way to
resolve this problem. But that wasnt the aim of the
people involved. The aim was from the beginning to
stop the recount.
Yet if you looked at the law and if you looked at the
case law, what Florida had consistently said was if
you can count the votes, you must count the votes. You
cannot penalize the voters for mistakes that the
administrators make or that the law may make. You
really have to give the voters the advantage.
RinR: Throughout The Battle for Florida, you claim the
law was bent out of shape to satisfy partisan goals.
Does that mean you think some of the actions by
Floridas elected officials merit a legal
investigation?
LdHS: Yes, absolutely. To me, I think what this
election teaches us is, first of all, we need to
strengthen the penalties for election tampering and we
need to return to an earlier understanding of high
crimes and misdemeanors. Weve gotten to the point
today where were looking for smoking guns all the
time. And the truth is that these officials take an
oath of office to uphold the constitution, and that
oath is a broad requirement that they enforce the laws
with good intentions.
But there wasnt even a cursory investigation of the
events, which points to another legal requirement that
we develop some kind of mechanism to investigate the
government. We have the government investigating
itself, and inevitably its unlikely youre going to
get much investigation.
If you look at the last 40 years at government
investigating itself, the only time weve gotten
aggressive investigation is when one party controlled
Congress and the other party controlled the executive
branch. (During) Watergate, it was Democrats
investigating a Republican; Iran-Contra, Democrats
investigating a Republican; Monica Lewinsky, the
Clinton impeachment, Republicans investigating a
Democrat. There, you get some aggressiveness. But
otherwise, you really have a system thats not
accountable because it wont investigate itself. And
if it investigates itself, it exonerates itself.
RinR: Isnt that just human nature?
LdHS: Absolutely, and thats what our institutions are
designed to do: Take the human beings with all their
best and worst and structure them in a way that we can
produce a democratic, responsible government. Weve
come a long way. I mean, if you think about it, secret
balloting is a relatively new invention. In
Reconstruction, when blacks were first voting, they
did it in public. You had a specific ballot that you
took in for a particular candidate, and they knew who
you were voting for.
Its all part of the historical developmental process
where we try to make our government more democratic,
more responsive, more transparent. But weve still got
a long way to go.
RinR: What about recount procedures? Have those been
clarified?
LdHS: There are now specified standards. So lets say
we need to have a recount: You would now have
standards that would be uniform across the state as
opposed to under the law in 2000, (when) the election
commissions at the local level were supposed to
determine that.
But the reality was (in 2000) people were using rules
of thumb. Now the law specifies what the requirements
are.
RinR: How do you think your political beliefs
influence your views? You call yourself an
independent, right?
LdHS: Certainly when I came to Tallahassee in 1994, I
viewed myself as part of a professional leadership
class in the state. There was a group of professional,
ex-politicians [Former Governor] Reubin Askew would
have been oneof people who were knowledgeable and
active and interested and not really partisan.
But state politics changed. When [Gov. Lawton] Chiles
beat Jeb Bush by 60,000 votes, it was one of the
closest elections up to that time. I remember Chiles
saying that he had never experienced a campaign like
that. Jeb Bush had brought in a Washington-style,
highly effective, highly professional campaign and
nearly beat him. Chiles was a legend in Florida, an
incumbent governor, and he almost got beat.
By 1998, Jeb Bush went about really consolidating
authority, and it became a very partisan system. And
at that point, frankly, my political orientation quit
mattering. What started mattering to me was having a
democracy, having a government that was actually
responsive.
One of the things I would hear a lot is people would
say, well, if the Democrats were in, they would do the
same thing. And I thought about that, and my
conclusion is hell no, they wouldnt. I know the
Democrats; I know Reuben Askew. That guy would have
been an absolute maniac about being technically and
legally and ethically straightforward and correct in
the application of the law. If there had been a
recount under his administration, he would have been
bending over backwards to make sure it was right.
(But) today, the belief in the truth, that there
(even) is a truth, has pretty much vanished across the
board. Its not just Democrats; its not just
Republicans. But its been replaced by cynicism.
RinR: Finally, Id like to go back to the big
picture theme of your book. You call for an
unflinching search for truth in the tradition of the
Ancient Greeks who questioned everything. But
Socrates, the top truth-searcher of the day, was put
to death for constantly prodding citizens to examine
whether their convictions were grounded in a firm
foundation of factssuggesting he was too democratic
to live in a Republic. Two thousand and some years
later, what makes you think a majority of Americansor
anybody else, for that matterwant to stare their
democratic shortcomings in the face?
LdHS: Im not sure that they do.
After Socrates was executed, Plato, his student, went
out to the countryside to buy a piece of land. He
bought it from the family of a war hero named
Academus. And the academy today is called that by
virtue of this decision.
The reason Plato went out of town is, he realized the
town people didnt want to hear that their beliefs
about the gods were myths, that their institutions
were founded somewhat arbitrarily, that they didnt
know what they were talking about when they said they
wanted justice.
Youd like to hope that in the 21st century people
would be mature enough, but I dont know. This is a
turning point potentially for us. If we dont
recognize the disorder, I dont think we have many
years left of democracy in the United States.
Im not entirely convinced that its not too late,
even as we speak.
http://www.research.fsu.edu/researchr/winter2005/features/battlefield.htmlLet us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. ======================================================================== Archives Available at:
http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listserv.aol.com/ <A HREF="">ctrl</A> ======================================================================== To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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