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Authors: James T. Patterson

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Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (105 page)

BOOK: Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore

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56
. Chads were tiny pieces of ballots that were supposed to fall off when punched ballots went through voting machines, thereby leaving holes in the ballots that would reveal the preferences of voters. Many Florida ballots had chads that had not fallen off. Others had “dimpled” or “pregnant” chads that did not dangle from ballots but that might indicate voter intent. For accounts of these battles, see Jack Rakove, ed.,
The Unfinished Election of 2000
(New York, 2001); Jeffrey Toobin,
Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election
(New York, 2001); and
Newsweek
, Nov. 20, 27, Dec. 4, 11, 18, 2000, Jan. 1, 2001.

57
. It was also true, however, that the turnout of black voters was higher than it had been in earlier elections.
New York Times
, May 24, 2004. Florida was one of nine states in 2000 that permanently disfranchised felons, a third of whom were African American men. This prohibition, affecting an estimated 600,000 Floridian felons who had done their time, presumably disadvantaged Democrats. Later estimates concluded that various state laws prevented approximately 3.9 million felons from voting in 2000. Ibid., Oct. 27, Nov. 9, 2004.

58
. Margolick et al., “The Path to Florida.”

59
. Toobin,
Too Close to Call
, 210, 233.

60
. Article II stated, in part, “Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress.” For analysis of constitutional issues, see Larry Kramer, “The Supreme Court in Politics,” in Rakove,
The Unfinished Election of 2000,
105–57.

61
. Toobin,
Too Close to Call
, 227.

62
. Ibid., 241.

63
. The five conservatives in the case were Chief Justice William Rehnquist, Antonin Scalia, Sandra Day O’Connor, Anthony Kennedy, and Clarence Thomas. The others were Stephen Breyer, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, John Paul Stephens, and David Souter.

64
. The decision was
per curiam
, with no author named. It was generally believed, however, that the key author was Justice Kennedy and that he had received strong backing from Justice O’Connor. Margolick et al., “The Path to Florida.”

65
. Two other dissenting justices, Stevens and Ginsburg, believed that the lack of a uniform standard for manual vote counting did not present constitutional problems. In Florida as in other states, Ginsburg pointed out, counties had long used various kinds of ballots and had decided in differing ways whether or not to accept votes, without constitutional questions being raised about equal protection. Toobin,
Too Close to Call
, 264–67; Margolick et al., “The Path to Florida”;
New York Times
, Dec. 13, 2000.

66
. For much that follows, see
Newsweek
, Dec. 18, 2000, 28–42, and Dec. 25, 2000, 46–50; and
Time
, Dec. 25, 2000, 76–79.

67
.
New York Times
, Dec. 11, 2000. See also Safire, ibid., Dec. 11, 14, 2000.

68
. Johnson,
The Best of Times
, 529. See also Hendrick Hertzberg, “Counted Out,”
New Yorker
, Dec. 24, 2000, 41–42.

69
. The consortium concluded that Bush would have won a popular-vote majority in Florida if the Supreme Court had approved the Florida court’s order for a manual recount of the roughly 61,000 undervotes, but that Gore would have won if the state’s approximately 113,000 overvotes had also been recounted manually. Margolick et al., “The Path to Florida.”

70
.
New York Times
, Nov. 12, 2001; Witcover,
Party of the People
, 723. Toobin,
Too Close to Call
, emphasized that more Floridians (among them the voters who mistakenly voted for Buchanan in Palm Beach County) intended to vote for Gore than for Bush and that the victory of Bush, sanctioned by the Supreme Court, was therefore a “crime against democracy.”

71
.
New York Times
, Feb. 24, 2004. Bush supporters, however, presented “what ifs” of their own. In each of four states that Bush lost by very narrow margins—Iowa, Wisconsin, Oregon, and New Mexico—the number of votes for Buchanan exceeded the margins of victory. Assuming that most of those voters would have opted for Bush in a straightup contest between Bush and Gore, Bush would have taken those states, thereby gaining 30 electoral votes. He would thus have taken the electoral college even without winning Florida. Harry Browne, the Libertarian candidate, also received votes that might otherwise have gone to Bush. In Florida, Browne won 16,415 votes. The bottom line: In an election as close as this one, the “what ifs” are virtually endless.

72
. The top vote-getter had previously failed to become president three times: in 1824, when a post-election ballot of the House of Representatives chose John Quincy Adams over Andrew Jackson; in 1876 when a specially created electoral commission gave Rutherford Hayes, the Republican nominee, an electoral college margin of one over Samuel Tilden; and in 1888, when Benjamin Harrison, also a Republican, won more electoral college votes than did Grover Cleveland. See Jack Rakove, “The E-College in the E-Age,” in Rakove,
The Unfinished Election of 2000,
201–34; and Alexander Keyssar, “The Electoral College Flunks,”
New York Review of Books
, March 24, 2005, 16–18.

73
. Maine and Nebraska authorized some of their electoral votes to be apportioned according to popular majorities in congressional districts, but that had never happened, and in 2000, Maine’s four votes went to Gore and Nebraska’s five went to Bush. According to a later estimate, if all states in 2000 had apportioned electoral votes according to popular votes, the final count in the electoral college would have been 269 for Gore, 263 for Bush, and 6 for Nader. Because a majority in the College of 270 is required for election, a vote of state delegations in the House of Representatives would then have had to settle the issue—presumably for Bush.
New York Times
, Sept. 19, 2004. The final electoral college tally in 2000 was 271 for Bush and 266 for Gore. One Democratic elector from the District of Columbia cast a blank ballot in protest against the denial of rights of self-government in the district.

74
. There were only thirteen Republican governors in 1975, and only five states in which the GOP had full control of the legislature. At that time eight states had legislatures in which Democrats ran one chamber and Republicans the other.

75
. In 2001, there were twenty-seven Republican and twenty-one Democratic governors. (The other two were independent.) The GOP then controlled sixteen state legislatures, to seventeen for Democrats. The other legislatures (bicameral) were split or (as in the case of unicameral Nebraska) officially non-partisan.

76
. Though published estimates of party identifications vary, all conclude that Republicans gained over the years, as did the percentages of people who normally called themselves independents.

77
. In May 2001, Senator James Jeffords of Vermont broke with the Republican Party and became an independent, thereby enabling the Democrats to take control of the Senate for the next nineteen months.

78
. Morris Fiorina et al.,
Culture Wars? The Myth of a Polarized America
(New York, 2004); Louis Menand, “The Unpolitical Animal,”
New Yorker
, Aug. 30, 2004, 92–96.