Retrospective indignation on who didn't get to vote in Florida raises interesting questions, not least: What about ethnic minorities who, never mind the dimpled chad, didn't go to the polls at all? And never mind the minorities; what about all the non-minorities who didn't vote at all?
The national participation in the election this year reached 51 percent, which means that almost one-half of eligible voters didn't even try to vote. Question: If voting is so clearly a necessary act of vindicated citizenship, why is curiosity so great about John, whose vote was untranscribed, and not about James, who made no attempt to realize his voting right?
The New York Times' editorial page assures us that the huge curiosity over the Florida vote -- there are many organizations engaged in their own vote-counting -- has nothing really to do with the election of a new president. That job has been done and certified. The motivating force for the re-recount is a concern to discover whether there were patterns of injustice from which black Americans especially suffered. It is held that in some districts voting machines were crankier than in others, and that face-to-face with such machines, some voters simply gave up and went home. And lo! These machines are regularly located in areas of higher black concentration.
Does that add up to a violation of the Voting Rights Act? The immediate answer to that question is: Yes -- if the intention of the voting-machine providers was to discourage the black vote. But if there are Model A voting machines that are easy and efficient, and Model F voting machines that are less user-friendly, political iniquity is not proven. The likelier explanation is that we have another instance of poorer sections of town having more potholes than more affluent sections of town, from which distribution of municipal solicitude we can draw the usual conclusions, but these do not tell us that a deprivation of the vote, based on equal voting rights for everybody, has been proven.
On the matter of the posthumous recount, one hears about the "documentary cravings of historians and journalists." Yeah. We say it's spinach and the hell with it. The rabid interest is motivated by a craving psychologically to invalidate the election of George W. Bush. Not invalidate it in the sense that he will be ushered out of the White House, just strip him of his legitimacy. It is the equivalent of a DNA expert sneaking up on the king to snip off a strand of hair that will prove he was not his father's son.