Recount, HBO’s dramatic recreation of events surrounding Florida’s 2000 presidential voting fiasco which landed George W. Bush in the White House, debuts on May 25. Early returns look good, at least with regard to the film’s entertainment value, which should come as no surprise given the network’s long track record of high-quality original programming. The consensus of critics who’ve screened
Recount — a group that doesn’t include me, by the way — seems to be that, despite its token gestures at evenhandedness, the film makes clear that supporters of Al Gore were more right than wrong while supporters of Bush were more wrong than right.
That fact, too, should come as no surprise. Setting aside Hollywood’s notorious political demographics, the proposition that justice was done is never as compelling as the proposition that justice was denied. Outrage sells. “He that goeth about to persuade a multitude that they are not so well governed as they ought to be shall never want attentive and favorable hearers,” the English theologian Richard Hooker wrote in 1594. “Whereas on the other side, if we maintain things that are established, we have . . . to strive with a number of heavy prejudices deeply rooted in the hearts of men who think that herein we serve the time, and speak in favor of the present state, because thereby we either hold or seek preferment.” In other words, rail against the status quo and you’re David challenging Goliath; defend the status quo and you’re a suck-up.
Recount, therefore,
is certain to fire up that substantial portion of the electorate that still believes the 2000 presidential election was stolen. But before we get our collective undies in a bunch, here are a few points to keep in mind.
1) On the matter of chads. The following instructions were provided at every polling location in Florida where punch-card ballots were used: “After voting, check your ballot card to be sure your voting selections are clearly and cleanly punched and there are no chips left hanging on the back of the card.” If you failed to follow these instructions, your selections might not be tallied by the machines that counted the ballots. At first glance, the system seems apolitical; the machines don’t care whose votes they count and don’t count. But the upshot was that minimal literacy was required to ensure you cast a successful vote. Or, to put it another way, the machines would disallow functional illiterates’ ballots more often than they would reject those of other folks. Since functional illiterates make up a reliable Democratic constituency, the appearance of a conspiracy to disenfranchise Gore voters was destined to emerge.
However, the entire hand-recount process, in which election officials sorted through paper ballots and attempted to decipher voters’ intentions based on “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads,” amounted to an effort to include would-be voters who screwed up. The Democratic mantra “let every vote count” thus translated into “let every screw-up count.”
2) On the matter of black voter suppression: During his 2004 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate John Kerry repeatedly asserted that “a million” black voters had been disenfranchised by Republican chicanery during the 2000 election. To which the proper response remains: All right, Senator, name one. Just one. One black citizen who was registered to vote, eligible to vote, but was prevented from voting by Republicans anywhere in the United States during the 2000 presidential election.
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