There is a lot of finger-pointing going on in the aftermath of the  presidential election. Many blame the news media’s faulty election-night coverage for what has transpired into over two weeks of recounts and litigation. But the news media can’t be blamed for partaking in the competition to break the news first. For the networks, timeliness is everything. The first to get the scoop is the first to get the bucks. That’s capitalism.

The fault lies with the Voter News Service, the agency that conducts exit polling and relays the results to the networks. VNS made Florida results available to the networks an hour before the polls closed in the panhandle of the state, which may have discouraged some people from even going to the polls. Aside from inhibiting voter turnout, the results provided were inaccurate at first when Al Gore was the predicted winner, and then evidently not reliable, as George W. Bush’s predicted win was retracted in the wee hours of the morning. It appears as if no one is happy with VNS; Republican congressmen are examining the networks’ election-night coverage, as they say it was deliberately working in favor of Gore, and Democrats accuse that Gore is portrayed as a sore loser because the race had been called for Bush when it was in fact too close to call.

Moreover, the networks, especially FOX News (the first to call Bush as the nation’s next president), have taken just as much heat for relying on the monopoly of VNS. Although the networks have their own polling services and their own statisticians by which to check the VNS’s results, this system of checks and balances is about as democratic as partisan judge appointments. Simply, the use of the VNS is purely economic. It is cheaper for the networks to rely solely on one source for its information than to have to pay others for the same service and what they supposed would be the same results. Yet, without other sources of information readily available to put the VNS’s numbers into perspective, how are the networks to know that other polling services would have had the same results?

While the VNS’s role in the election results is debatable, Al Gore’s is not. His biggest accomplishment over the past two weeks has been demonstrating that he will stop at nothing to be president, save for showing some integrity and respect for the U.S. Constitution. His campaign manager, William Daley, has said that the campaign is not over. And indeed, it is not. Democratic operatives have descended on Florida to turnover the election by any means necessary—sound familiar?

The campaign has demanded recounts in three predominantly Democratic counties, Palm Beach, Broward and Miami-Dade, whose residents presumably aren’t capable of casting an eligible vote. The campaign has thus far been successful in gaining permission to employ innovative standards for conducting the manual recounts. This strategy resembles an affirmative action policy in so much as it focuses on one particular group, in this case, the residents of the three Democratic counties, to achieve a desired outcome (i.e. Gore winning the election). Perhaps this week we will hear the Gore camp request that Democratic ballots in Florida be worth twice as much as Republican ones.

The objective is to determine “the intent of the voter,” by looking for any prick or mark that could be contrived as an effort to vote for Gore. Whether the results of these recounts will be included in the certification by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris is yet to be determined. A state circuit court judge ruled Friday, November 17th that Harris did not have to include the results of recounts in four counties, but later in the day the Florida Supreme Court blocked Harris from certifying the election on Saturday, which would have most likely named Bush as the winner. The U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals also refused to stop the recounts from continuing, another setback for Bush.

As long as the recounts go forward, we compromise the justice of our democratic system. In elections past, if a ballot did not register a result from a counting machine, the ballot was disqualified and thrown out. This year, however, those ballots have been collected and then subjectively examined by a Democratic canvassing board. Voters must exhibit enough self-responsibility to cast their own ballots, or Gore’s henchmen will do it for them. The state of the “chad” is the all-important factor; whether it is hanging by two or three corners, dimpled, impregnated or swinging can make all the difference. This process in and of itself is problematic, but when you have a bunch of unqualified senior citizens working long hours and shuffling, poking and using the ballots as fans, it becomes downright chaotic. Aside from this there are 500 of the best lawyers in the country looking over their shoulders. Bush’s team is looking for evidence of tampering and fraud, of which there is an overabundance, and Gore’s team is looking for extra ballots, of which their are none .

Gore’s campaign has been adamant in their claim that they only want to insure that “the will of the people” is carried out.  The only people they are referring to, however, are those who might have voted for him, had they done it correctly. Apparently the rest of us don’t need special attention. To suggest that the butterfly ballot might have actually confused people or the concept of punch-cards explains the existence of the Electoral College. People simply can’t cast a ballot by themselves.

Gore’s cronies insist that he is the rightful heir of the White House because he won the so-called “popular vote,” a misleading concept. Both campaigns sought to collect the highest number of electoral votes, not popular votes. So Gore’s achievement is irrelevant to the contest. Had both been campaigning to achieve the most popular votes, then Bush would have spent time campaigning in Texas and Gore likewise in New York; neither candidate would have been able to take either state and its electoral votes for granted. Perhaps Gore would have won a true popular anyway, but this is merely a case of partial equilibrium in which one changes one aspect of the rules to achieve an outcome that is dubious on its face. Had both men sought after the true popular vote, it would have been an entirely different ballgame.

Where we go from here, nobody knows. By the time this issue comes to print, it is likely that the outcome of the election will still be in the balance. Literally. It will probably be locked up in some state, federal, circuit, or even US Supreme Court. However, regardless of the outcome, don’t expect the loser to take things lightly. Expect that man to be one of the frontrunners for the 2004 presidential election. For the time being though, let’s just hope that Al Gore and his cohorts don’t pervert the democratic process so badly that there won’t be a 2004 presidential election. Gore has waited his whole life for the opportunity to be the president. Who says that if he reaches that pinnacle, he could ever let it go?