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Commentary -What Connecticut Can Learn From The Mess In Florida

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Commentary –

What Connecticut Can Learn From The Mess In Florida

By Chris Powell

What can Connecticut learn from the trouble in counting the votes for president in Florida?

First, that Connecticut is blessed in its election machinery and personnel.

It is a small state that, in state and national elections, uses the same voting equipment – booth- style mechanical tabulators – and the same ballot format everywhere, with a minimum of paper ballots, the sort whose counting can require judgment and interpretation. In Connecticut recounts are simple matters of arithmetical error, which allows no judgment and interpretation, or the qualification of particular voters, which, while requiring judgment and interpretation, seldom involves many votes. Recounts in Connecticut do not involve claims that the ballot used by some people was more confusing than the ballot used by others, nor do recounts in Connecticut require figuring whether a punch card has been indented sufficiently to signify a voter’s intent.

And Connecticut’s chief election official, its secretary of the state, Susan Bysiewicz, has followed the practice of her Democratic and Republican predecessors in declining to get involved in the campaigns of candidates whose election she has to supervise. While Connecticut’s secretaries of the state themselves have been elected in the usual partisan process along with everyone else, once elected they have taken a step back from politics – unlike Florida’s secretary of state, who, by virtue of her co-chairmanship of George W. Bush’s presidential campaign in Florida, suddenly found her public service impugned by circumstances.

So while Connecticut has had its share of recounts and even recounts that have reversed what seemed like the outcome on Election Night (including just this month the recount that re-elected state Rep Robert Farr, R-West Hartford, by nine votes), there have been few doubts about the fairness of elections here. Occasionally absentee ballots are abused by Democratic campaigns in Connecticut’s distressed cities, but criminal prosecution has discouraged it. Perhaps enduring questions were raised in the last 20 years only by Gov William A. O’Neill’s narrow victory over his challenger for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, former US Rep Toby Moffett, in a primary election for Waterbury’s Democratic state convention delegates in 1986.

Second, despite its good fortune, Connecticut may learn from the trouble in Florida that the time to examine the adequacy of election machinery is before a problem develops with it. After all, the voting machines in use throughout Connecticut aren’t manufactured anymore, just reconditioned. Far more advanced equipment is available and in use in other states, though not Florida itself.

And third, Connecticut may learn from the trouble in Florida that despite its own smallness and homogenization, and the superficial standardization brought to the rest of the country by franchise restaurants and the mass media, the United States is actually still a very big place with many differences – a collection of many different and independent places. Using the same ballot in all its local jurisdictions and being so small, Connecticut may find it hard to imagine a state where things as basic as voting are done differently within the state itself, and where there are many different little jurisdictions with their own quirky authority.

But of course to a great extent that is exactly what that antique institution now in the spotlight, the Electoral College, is about – protecting, as it does, the local against the national. It says on the dollar bill, “E pluribus unum,” and while Connecticut may understand the “unum” best, what has been happening in Florida is the “pluribus” part. It may be annoying sometimes but it is Florida’s business, and Florida’s right to be a little different, if a bit incompetent sometimes, is basic to the freedom of Americans everywhere else.

 

(Chris Powell is managing editor of the Journal Inquirer in Manchester. )

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