The past week has brought us an interesting juxtaposition of two voting controversies in Florida. Last Sunday we saw the HBO movie Recount, in which the events of the disputed 2000 presidential election in Florida were dramatized, and yesterday we watched as the Democratic Party's Rules and By-Laws Committee decided what to do about the votes in Florida (and Michigan) which they had disallowed last August when both states violated the authorized calender for holding primaries.
Hillary Clinton has tried to say these "disenfranchisements" of the voters in Florida in 2000 and 2008 are exactly the same, but they are not. The 2000 election, in which there were multiple problems with the vote, could have been resolved with a statewide recount. For whatever reasons, Al Gore did not ask for a total state recount, and the partial recount he did ask for was stopped by the U.S. Supreme Court. This was a travesty. There was a remedy that was obvious to all, but the Republican Party sent out their staffers to act as Florida residents spontaneously protesting, and the Supreme Court decided it was more important to put Bush into office than allow the protests and the recount to continue.
The problems in the 2008 primaries in Florida and Michigan were numerous, and only one resembled the situation with Florida in 2000. First of all, the voters of Florida and Michigan were told months ahead of time that their votes would not count because their states had decided to hold their primaries before Super Tuesday. After a long process of contemplating what states should go first, the DNC had decided to let four states go before all the others (an imperfect system, certainly, but necessary in order to create an orderly process). Florida and Michigan were not among the four, but scheduled their primary early anyway. This was nothing like Florida in 2000, which first of all was a general election and not a primary, and secondly was a dispute about who really won a very close election where there were multiple problems with voter rolls and ballots.
The one way in which Florida in 2000 resembled Florida and Michigan in 2008 was not a way that provided an advantageous argument to Senator Clinton. In Florida in 2000 many people had been taken off the voting rolls because Katherine Harris had hired a company to eliminate people whose names resembled those of felons in the state. Hundreds of thousands of people may have been mistakenly turned away at the polls because of this and been unable to vote. In Florida and Michigan, hundreds of thousands may also not have voted, primarily because they believed the election would not count anyway.
When Florida and Michigan went ahead awith their unauthorized primaries, many voters stayed home as they believed their vote would not count. So the final vote count could not have been a true reflection of the will of the people. It was only a true reflection of those who chose to go to the polls. Senator Clinton wanted us to believe that the vote in Florida and Michigan in 2008 was a true reflection of the will of the people, when in fact it was not. Trying to discern what that will was would have been impossible, just as impossible as going back and reinstating all those Floridians wrongfully disenfranchised in 2000 and allowing them to vote after the fact.
Nevertheless, the other problems in Florida in 2000 could have been remedied with a recount, which was never allowed. There was no similar remedy in Florida and Michigan in 2008, unless there had been new elections which were costly and logistically problematic, and so the states both decided against them.
This meant that if Florida and Michigan wanted their votes to count, they would have to appeal to the Rules and By-Laws Committee, which they did. Last Saturday at the hearing, the committee members had a tough job. First they had to decide if they should give back the votes they had stripped from Florida and Michigan, and then they had to decide if the vote that was recorded was a true reflection of the will of the people, especially when many people in those states didn't vote because they believed the vote would not count.
In both cases, the committee decided to give back half of the votes, a compromise to honor those who voted and still exact a penalty so in future elections states would honor the dates authorized by the Party. With Florida, the votes were awarded as the people voted, even though this could not have been a fair reflection of the will of all the voters. This was a concession by the Obama campaign.
Michigan, however, was a different story, in that most of the candidates had taken their names off the ballot, and of the final contenders, only Senator Clinton's name remained. There was a category for "uncommitted," however, which complicated things.
There was a big difference of opinion on the committee about how to deal with Michigan and its uncommitted votes. Ultimately, the decision was made to accept the compromise worked out by the Michigan Democratic Party which awarded Obama all of the uncommitted delegates plus four more, largely because write-in votes for him had been disallowed and because exit polls showed that most of those who voted "uncommitted" as well as some who voted for Clinton actually preferred Obama.
Obviously, this was an imperfect decision, as all compromises are. Had the committee done what Senator Clinton wanted, to not award any delegates to Obama, it would have been even more imperfect.
Harold Ickes, a Clinton supporter and advisor to her campaign, and a member of the committee, went ballistic. He insisted this decision was not a true reflection of the will of the voters, and threatened to appeal the decision. He threw around the word "ass" a lot, and fired up Clinton supporters in the audience who began shouting "McCain" and "Denver," as in "we'll vote for McCain rather than Obama," and "we'll take this to the convention in Denver."
I understand the disappointment of the Clinton people, including Ickes, but this is such a unique situation that I don't think there was any solution that could have satisfied both campaigns and the voters of both states. What Ickes doesn't want to acknowledge is that the starting point was that neither Senator Clinton nor Senator Obama were going to get any votes from those states when the day started yesterday. By the end of the day, both states were given half their delegates back, and Clinton got more delegates than Obama. There was absolutely no way to know how those states would have voted if their votes had counted from day one, and no way to know how many stayed home that day because they believed their votes wouldn't count. There was also no way to know how many of Obama's supporters in Michigan stayed home not just because the vote wouldn't count, but because their candidate's name wasn't even on the ballot.
So the Rules committee accepted a compromise which the members could live with. If Harold Ickes cannot live with the compromise, it's because he's a fierce Hillary supporter who didn't get what he wanted.
As some commentators were saying yesterday, this ruling proves that the Clintons no longer control the Democratic Party. Let's hope what the ruling does mean is that compromise, rationality, and a spirit of unity are what controls the Democratic Party. And let's hope further that Senator and President Clinton adopt that spirit as well and do the right thing this week when Senator Obama wins the number of votes needed to be the nominee.
