Date: 20 Dec 2000 23:51:54 -0800 From: "Carl Ellison" To: newshour@pbs.org Subject: 12/20/00 show: the Denver group Thank you for that segment. Those few minutes of footage could fuel hours of serious discussion. I don't know if you planned it that way, but you managed to capture several major threads in the current debate through the people you picked for that group. Is there any chance you'll post the RealAudio or a transcript of that segment? (*) Linda Houston, for example, is in some kind of dream world. If she weren't so obviously a straight, upright person, I'd suspect her of being on drugs. Her statement was that the 50-50 election means that everybody is thinking very similarly, instead of being at opposite poles and never getting anything done. She has it exactly backwards, of course. For everyone to be in agreement, the vote would have to have been 100-0. With an exact 50-50 vote, the opposite poles are in a permanent stalemate, barring some extraordinary action to break the deadlock. Wishful thinking won't do it. This tie result has implications for Bush. He is talking about his election promises, as if he had voter support for them -- as if he had a mandate. In fact, he has no mandate. He can't just adopt Gore's platform, either, even though that received more votes than his. Gore's platform had no mandate either. He needs to pursue only those platform-like items for which both sides agree. The $1.3T tax cut isn't one of those items. The 50-50 vote means that there is very little he can do, and nothing that was mentioned in the campaign, unless both sides agreed to it. For the rest of his work output he needs to go to the people and find out what they really want. (*) Bob Grabowski advocated destroying the Florida ballots, saying something like `the decision has been made and we need to stop bickering about it'. I agree that the purpose of an election is to declare a winner so that the bickering will cease -- but that winner has to be declared by the voice of the people. This time, as (*) Dee Cisneros pointed out, the winner wasn't elected -- he was selected. That means that the process has not come to an end and the bickering will not cease until the next legitimate presidential election. If the ballots were to be destroyed, then the accusation that Bush lucked out or cheated his way into the White House through the Supreme Court would probably change to one that he somehow actively engineered the Florida result and is now intent on destroying the evidence of the crime. I can imagine that crime being an impeachable offense. I agree with (*) Sara Bay that punch card voting is old fashioned, but as a security architect in the computer business, I worry about her blind faith in electronics. I know how easy it is to corrupt computers and their data, so I for one would not trust computer voting at this point. The machines we have so far don't provide the audit trail we need. The argument was made that the new electronic machines have no chads, no paper ballots, etc. You just get the answer. That is appealing, especially after Florida, but without an audit trail that can be used for a manual recount and without a means for normal human beings to inspect all of the electronic system (including its software) to make sure it hasn't been tampered with, I don't see how to trust such a system. Thanks again for the segment. I would love to see you devote an hour or two to just an analysis of that one segment. - Carl