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Boiling point Face Facts in FloridaBy Rick Horowitz Mullings and musings on the current circumstance: The machines invented themselves, you know. That's the thing about machines -- they invent themselves, which keeps the human element out of it. These particular machines -- the voting machines they've been using down in Florida -- sprung to life one day in an orange grove just outside Orlando. Their settings were already set and their calibrations were already calibrated: how big the holes had to be, and how much light had to shine through the holes to count a vote, and how sensitive the sensors had to be to see the light -- the machines made every one of those decisions for themselves. Humans weren't involved at all, which is why machines are totally objective and never make mistakes. George W. stands by machines. (Watch the boil.) George W. doesn't like the idea of manual recounts. He especially doesn't like the idea of manual recounts in specially selected, heavily Democratic counties; that wouldn't be fair to the other counties, he says. And manual recounts in every county, as Al Gore is now suggesting? George W. doesn't like that idea either; that would be "chaotic." Different people would be counting the votes in different places, he says, using different standards. Now, if all six million Florida ballots could be counted by just one person, that would be something else again. George W. wouldn't like that any better, of course, but he'd need to find another reason not to like it. It would take too long, for instance. That's the last thing George W. wants, a recount that keeps counting. George W. wants this thing finished now, while he's still ahead. (The boil?) Manual counting "introduces human error and politics into the vote-counting process," George W. says. Several Florida counties, including some Republican-leaning counties, have already used manual counts. That's different. Texas uses manual counts, too; George W. signed the law that made manual recounts the preferred method of settling voting disputes in Texas. That's different. There's no politics in Texas. There's also no human error in Texas. (Is that why George W. can be so calm about all those executions?) There's no politics in Florida either. When Florida's Secretary of State, after trying and trying and failing and failing to get the courts to shut down the recounts, exercised all the "discretion" that was in her and decided -- surprise! -- that she wouldn't accept recounted vote totals from any county, that nobody had given her good enough reasons, that the counting must stop right this minute, it didn't even occur to her that she had been co-chair of George W.'s Florida campaign, that she'd been a George W. convention delegate, that she'd campaigned for George W. in New Hampshire, or even that her boss, Florida's governor, was George W.'s brother. Politics was the furthest thing from her mind. (The boil.) Al Gore is the techno-geek, the automaton. George W. is the regular guy. The techno-geek is willing to rely on human beings across the state of Florida to count the votes once and for all. The regular guy stands by machines, which never make mistakes. The boil. George W. is trying to look presidential -- calm and composed, the look of a winner. But his face is erupting, red and raw for days on end. You can sense it in his eyes, but you can see it right there on his cheek: It's all bogus. It may not matter a bit, but you have to ask the question. Is there anyone in George W.'s entire entourage who honestly believes that, among all the Florida voters who went to the polls on Election Day, more people attempted to vote for their guy than for the other guy? His people can stand foursquare against hanging chads and dimpled chads. They can argue for "finality," and against "mind reading." They can tell themselves that a winning team has to be good and fortunate, that if they got a lucky bounce -- thousands of people bewildered by a butterfly -- well, those are the breaks of the game. But is there anyone in that room who truly believes that their guy was the people's choice? George W. knows better. The boil knows better. Let's hear it for the boil. Posted 11/16/00.
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Rick Horowitz