In this space a few weeks back, the motion was made, unsuccessfully, that we sequester the approximately 60,000 ballots, rather than treat them like the Alger Hiss typewriter or the Sacco-Vanzetti pistol. If the results of the new recount have the effect of increasing the size of Bush's vote, no harm is done. If they have the effect of suggesting that Florida belonged to Gore, what have we got that will please other than the National Enquirer and the NAACP? Why not explore the rumor that a majority of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence were drunk?
The impulse to explore and re-explore the Florida vote springs from the democratic faddism that overtook us in the past generation. The Supreme Court decided in 1962 (Baker vs. Carr) that every person had to be counted equally, thus causing, or trying to, a redistricting athwart many arrangements which were the fruit of political and social compromise. In 1965 we got a Voting Rights Act that forbade a state to insist that the voter know how to read. In 1971 we had a constitutional amendment that gave the vote to 18-year-olds. Most recently we have the so-called motor-voter contrivance, relieving potential voters of the ordeal of registering for the vote.
The implicit line here is: The more voters the better, never mind illiteracy or civic indifference. But the logical extension of this position is to insist that every citizen step up and vote. Many societies require every citizen to vote. In some of these, as in Mexico for 70 years, the results are fixed -- the same party always won -- but never mind that. If our obsession is now to be how did the voter in Florida vote, why should we not be interested in the question: How would elections fare if everyone had voted? More blacks than whites, representationally, voted in Florida this time around. What if every white had voted?
How about -- in our mad statistic-driven age -- extrapolating the vote? If 49 percent of Catholics who voted went for Gore, why not give Gore 49 percent of Catholics who did not vote? To go in the other direction would be to require everyone who voted for Gore to be able to spell Gore.