Since this rip-off has been nonpartisan, with the democrats holding only a slight edge over republicans who at least confess to the theft, I hope both political cults self-destruct in the current Florida controversy. I hope Al Gore drives his loyal parishioners into questioning why they ever voted for him in the first place. Particularly, since he promised to go right on stealing their money.

Legitimacy of the new government

In the last few weeks, the media has been filling the airwaves with talk of whether the new president, whoever wins, can unite the country behind him. Whether he will have any sort of mandate. Whether the people might always think that he is the illegitimate leader of the free world.

My immediate answer to that is a question. What sort of legitimacy is there in any system of representative government that overtaxes its people and then brags about it? When over-taxation accounts for more than 10 percent of revenue, isn’t that government already illegitimate?

By voting for either one of the two duds offered in this election, haven’t we already given both of them the mandate to continue stealing our money?

Setting that crucial issue aside for the moment, let’s look at some of the other points arising out of the crisis in Florida.

Counts vs. Recounts

Have we forgotten exactly why we went to machine voting in the first place? Why, in 1892, the first lever machine “Myers Automatic Booths” were introduced in Lockport, New York? Why in the next 50 years or so these became the standard way of voting across the country?

The lever machines do not allow recounts. There is nothing to look back at to determine “intent of the voter.” With a simple system of counter wheels or “cogs” inside the machine, each vote was recorded once and only once as the main activating lever was thrust home. It was impossible to “overvote.” Throwing a smaller lever, rocker, or eventually a push button on some of the newer versions, simply moved a “ten count” wheel one notch. When that cog held ten votes it, in turn, activated a “hundred count” wheel and caused it to move one more notch. And so on up to so many hundreds counted on a “thousand count” wheel. Once you pushed one button, you couldn’t push another for the same candidate. When the polls closed, people opened the machine and read the results much like any meter reader does in your basement.

Even though these lever machines are still in use in many parts of the country, and even though no one has manufactured parts for them since the Seventies, they were initially welcomed because they were better and more accurate than humans. Machines don’t think of sex half the time, aren’t distracted, don’t worry, take coffee and cigarette breaks, scratch themselves or talk to each other. They just count.

While these first machines made errors, gears slipped, cogs jammed, and they could be tampered with, they were still faster and more accurate than hand counting. Human beings have, thank God, a much greater potential for error than machines designed for nothing but this mundane task. Humans can’t even hold the image of a “loved one” in their minds for more than a minute or so, while a machine could hold that image forever if designed to do so. The human mind jumps all over the place, is easily distracted, and no matter how hard it tries has difficulty with the mundane. It’s our wonderful and imaginative human condition. It’s what separates us from the animal kingdom and will always make us more worthwhile than machines. It’s what makes us dreamers and able to invent.

And human minds improved voting machines. In the Fifties, International Business Machines (IBM, affectionately known as “Big Mother”) brought us punch cards and sorters. Data processing equipment that could read thousands, and even millions, of pieces of information in practically no time at all. A whole new job description arose in what was called “key punch operators.” These were people who transferred results from paper questionnaires (or ballots) to IBM cards. Right here, there’s an element of possible human error we try to eliminate in the voting booth by having the voter punch the card himself and all the old keypunch machines are in some Chicago warehouse.

While the government accepts these innovations very slowly, we have moved on to even better, more accurate and efficient, systems in the newer optical scanners. We’re a long way from today’s computer technology or “touch screen” voting, but the accepted optical scanners are better than either the punch cards or the lever machines.

Within all of this is something called “margin of error.” There is a margin of error in all of the machines. Improvements just make the margin of error lower and lower. Yet, all machines have a margin of error that, when it comes to counting, is considerably less than human error.

Margin of error

Cutting to the chaff as quickly as possible, there is one overriding factor that makes null and void everything that has occurred in Florida since the second recount. Meaningless. A futile attempt to do the impossible.

That dominant factor is the margin of error. Whether or not you’re a statistician, researcher, or someone accustomed to working with numbers, you should have some idea of a margin of error. You see it in almost every poll that’s published. Even the entertainment news media is accustomed to telling you that such-and-such result has a margin of error of two or three percent, meaning that the results could be interpreted as somewhere within a four to six percent range. It’s not something new, although it’s implications to the current Florida situation are devastating.

Every recount that’s been argued for, started, or finished since the second automatic machine recount in Florida has been within the margin of error. The numbers we’ve been trying to resolve, never greater than 1500 out of 6 million votes, were always much less than one-half of one percent. And the margin of error, even in the best punch card machines, was always greater than this. The machine’s margin of error was greater than this result right from the start.

As Chief Justice C. J. Wells of the Florida Supreme Court says in his dissenting opinion quoting John Allen Paulos of Temple University: “The margin of error in this election is far greater than the margin of victory, no matter who wins.” And then the Chief Justice goes on to say that: “Further judicial process will not change this self-evident fact and will only result in confusion and disorder.”

In other words, further recounts will never give us the answer. Every time you run the data, you will get a different answer. You can keep trying until you get one result that you might like better, but it still will not be conclusive. It’s a hopeless venture. And it was so right from the start.

Conclusion

We’ve been dragged down the garden path again. This time by politicians, lawyers and media people who thrive on controversy for different reasons. It’s been worse than the “76 million baby-boomer” story and certainly more damaging to the country, even though many who never thought of it before are learning elements of the Constitution and the Electoral College.

All of those good hearts and poor souls who devoted so much time and energy to recounts in Florida would have been better off if they had thrown bingo games to raise money for new voting equipment. Of course, no one is going to tell them that, and no one but the media is going to suggest that universities and watch dog groups descend on Florida to complete the recounts that were not allowed.

If anyone denounces what has happened in the last month in language other than “legalese” it will be the U.S. Supreme Court when they tactfully state that every voter has a modicum of responsibility to learn how to cast his or her vote correctly and that no law should mandate futile activities.

When George W. Bush was first reported to have won the State of Florida by the narrow margin of about 1,500 out of 6 million votes in the state, the die was already cast in mathematical improbability. The margin of victory was .00025 and well within the margin of error, no matter how recounts occur. Every recount from that point forward would turn out differently in any direction.

With the old lever machines used in some Florida counties, IBM cards in others, and the newer optical scanners in still other counties, the only positive thing left to do would be to update and standardize equipment and voting methods across the board. And wish everyone better luck next time.

Those who cry about making every vote count should realize that the more foolproof optical scanners could have been provided for every voting precinct in the entire country for much less than the federal government steals from Social Security every month. The motives for sticking with the older equipment are not healthy.