A Mickey Mouse election reminds America that Florida is king

By Jeffrey R. DeRego
HippoPress.com

First it was Walt Disney World, the holy grail of childhood vacation spots. Then it was Miami Vice, which placed fashion and pop-star cameos over plot and character development.

There is Scarface, Gloria Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine's ear splitting 80's Cuban-pop, Broward County Sheriff's deputies arresting 2 Live Crew for rapping about sex, an orange apocalypse due to spastic weather patterns which includes several hurricanes, the entire population of Haiti swimming to freedom and their subsequent return by the Coast Guard, Cuban baseball players drafted by the major leagues while still treading water off the coast of Key West, and one billion hours of Elian Gonzales.

I've even visited Florida!

What else does Florida want from me? For crying out loud, I don't have anymore to give!

Apparently they want me to explain the voting process to them.

Is reading a voting ballot so hard? Is counting those ballots so monumentally difficult? Did someone forget to carry the one? Apparently yes, and yes, and yes.

I, like so many other non-Floridians, voted Tuesday. Granted, the ballots in New Hampshire do not contain "holes" that require punching, but they do require reading skills, and I know that both Bush and Gore only contain four letters each so mistakes are possible.

But mistaking Gore (four letters) for Buchanan (a full eight letters) sounds even more ridiculous now than it did when I saw it on television.

I mean, let's be realistic, even Pat Buchanan admits that there was no way 3900 people could possibly have voted for him in Palm Beach County, and that he thought they meant to vote for Al Gore.

I am sure this admission fills the Reform Party with glee and confidence. Yeah, go Pat go...

Pat Buchanan could have completely convinced me that America as a whole had been sucked into a parallel universe by finishing this admission with, "because I am a lunatic and no one in their right mind would ever vote for me, and if someone did I might be inclined to notify the police... Hell, I didn't even vote for me!"

Pat Buchanan aside...

Now, it appears that several illiterate voters will file suit against the state of Florida because they believe their civil rights were violated during the election process. How is this possible?

The ballot presentation was confusing, apparently.

Since when was interpreting a voter ballot a civil right? Where were the televised marches through Washington where illiterate voters demanded pictograms of the candidates? Where were the riots? Where is the footage of demonstrators carrying misspelled signs as Washington police blasted them with water cannons? Where were the sit-in's?

Perhaps if the voters in question had taken more than one second to consider what they were presented with, this whole thing would be over by now.

I think worse than the admission that 3900 idiots had access to the election are the charges of voter fraud that have bounced back and forth between the Republicans and Democrats.

Allegations of voter fraud are nothing new... in Serbia.

Think about this, Italy described the United States as a banana republic. Italy! Whose contribution to 21st Century culture is Roberto Benigni.

Okay, I'll admit that butterfly ballots were probably a bad idea, but then, voting for either Al Gore or George W. Bush was a bad idea too, and no one, not even Floridians, complained about that.

Worse than the inherent "American" jokes that will fill the international side of the Internet, worse than the damage this whole fiasco does to countries with fledgling democracies who look to us for guidance, worse than the prospect that lawyers will become involved, and perhaps even worse than either of the candidates, is the fact that Election 2000 tarnishes the democracy we espouse to so many other nations.

Copyright © 2000 HIPPOPRESS LLC. All rights reserved.