[Page 3: Dysfunctional Performance: The U.S. Voting Machine Debacle and the Machinery of Democracy]

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Butterflies, Chads, and Felonious Acts

At the center of the drama that was "Florida" was the image of an electoral system that was deeply flawed, both by mechanical failure and by intentional voter disenfranchisement. In the days and months following November 7th a whole new vocabulary of dysfunction bombarded the U.S. media: "chads," the small circles that fall out from the ballot after a hole-punch voting machine successfully registers votes; "hanging chads," those same circles incompletely punched out; "dimpled" and "pregnant chads," the possible indication of a voter's intent in a ballot whose chad has been unsuccessfully processed by the voting machine. And then there were the "butterfly ballots," ballots so poorly designed (in "butterfly" rather than traditional "column" lay-out) that thousands of votes in a Florida district overwhelmingly populated by Democrats appear to have been mistakenly cast for Pat Buchanan (the most overtly radical right-wing conservative candidate in the election) rather than for Al Gore, whose name lay confusingly across the ballot from Buchanan's.

Florida law requires an automatic recount when the difference in the total number of votes cast is less than one half of one percent. The legal standard for such a recount is based upon ascertaining "voter intent." The Bush team disagreed, arguing that to even try and assess intent from the array of mechanical failures was an abrogation of the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution, as there couldn't possibly be one equal standard for ascertaining that intent. (The equal protection clause is part of the 14th Amendment. It states that "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall [...] deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." It was enacted shortly after the American Civil War to ensure fair and equal treatment to ex-slaves.) The Supreme Court majority agreed, and so a law that was designed to enfranchise voters was interpreted in this instance as a way of disenfranchising them.

And voter disenfranchisement did not just occur through the mechanical failure of punch-card and paper ballot machines. There were also tens of thousands of disproportionately African-American Florida voters (90% of whom would statistically have voted Democrat) who were not even allowed to cast their votes. These were what one reporter called Florida's "disappeared" votes (7).

In what many see as part of the U.S. scenario of "Jim Crow," (8) on November 7, 2000, tens of thousands of black voters arrived at polling stations to find that electoral boards had passed draconian measures requiring three pieces of identification to be able to vote, or that the board had failed to register them through the "motor voter" laws specifically designed to register lower income citizens. Most insidious in this scenario of voter disenfranchisement was the egregiously incorrect (and illegal, even by Florida law) "felons list" which purged 57,000 ex-felons from the voter rolls in what voter demographics authority David Bositis called a "patently obvious technique to discriminate against black voters." (9) This list, compiled by a private consulting firm in an unprecedented governmental move that gave a non-governmental agency power to facilitate the elimination of voters' rights, contained many hundreds of mismatched names. The result was voters arriving at the polls to find they couldn't vote because an ex-felon of the same name was on the list. The list also contained names of thousands of voters who had been convicted only of misdemeanors or who had served time in states that had reinstated their voting rights after their release from prison. In all, it has been estimated that 90% of the names on the felons list (also referred to as "the scrub list") were "fake"—that is, they were on the list erroneously, either by intention or by mishap (10). The company that created the list, ChoicePoint, was hired by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (at the request of Governor Jeb Bush). When the corruption was revealed, Harris blamed ChoicePoint for the errors, while ChoicePoint in its turn blamed the whole morass on misunderstanding the guidelines given by Bush and Harris (11).