Counting Votes: Lessons from the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida.

Counting Votes: Lessons from the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida. Edited by Robert P. Watson. (Gainesville and other cities: University Press of Florida, c. 2004. Pp. xxiv, 302. $34.95, ISBN 0-8130-2714-4.)

Counting Votes: Lessons from the 2000 Presidential Election in Florida is an aptly named collection of varied and thoughtful essays that are less concerned with retelling the story of 2000 than with exploring the broader issues of voting technology and election reform raised by the Bush-Gore struggle, as well as its implications for the electoral college.

After an incisive table-setting essay by Robert P. Watson, the book does examine some aspects of the Florida debacle as seen through the eyes of a few participants. Thomas R. Spencer, the Republican Party counsel in Miami-Dade County, recounts the experiences that led to his crucial testimony before Judge Sanders Sauls in the contest trial--testimony that the U.S. Supreme Court later cited to show that inconsistent standards were used in counting undervotes. The much-beleaguered David Leahy, supervisor of elections in Miami-Dade County, tells what it was like to run the election, particularly on election day itself. Jess Gittelson, director of the Voting Equipment Center of Broward County, explains the logistics of placing and maintaining 6,500 voting machines.

The meatiest part of the book, however, begins with a section titled "Voting Systems and Problems" (p. 103). In the first essay, Teresa C. Green, Rhonda S. Kinney, and Jason Mitchell seek to put Florida and its implications for voting access into historical perspective. They note that the "ideologies and institutions of a racial, gendered, and class hierarchy have shaped America in interaction with its liberal and democratic features." The inequalities in voting policies resulting from the former, they argue, "were dismantled only through great struggles, and it is not clear that these struggles have ended" (p. 110).

Thus their study of three southeastern Michigan counties hypothesizes that minority voters are most likely to be stuck with obsolete and often malfunctioning lever or punch-card voting systems; whites in wealthier counties and communities are more likely to have advanced optical-scanning technology. The authors, however, do not appear to distinguish statistically between optical-scanning systems that do not alert voters to errors because the counting is done later at central locations and systems in which the ballots are run through at the precincts.

Still, this basic difference in technology dovetails with the analysis of unrecorded votes nationwide for the 2000 election, as discussed in the essay by David C. Kimball, Chris T. Owens, and Katherine McAndrew Keeney. The authors show that the Votomatic punch-card system produced the highest percentage of unrecorded votes in the country (2.8 percent).

Yet the essay by Martha E. Kropf and Stephen Knack finds that on a national basis, unlike southeastern Michigan, "there was very little difference in the likelihood that whites and blacks, or poor and nonpoor, lived in counties using punch-card technology." Indeed, counties with punch-card systems generally tended "to have higher incomes per capita, higher tax revenues, and larger populations than [did] counties with modern voting equipment" (p. 125). Furthermore, the figures from Florida in 2000 show that the highest percentage of unrecorded votes occurred in optical-scanning counties with central location counts, not in the punch-card counties.

Counting Votes also focuses on the electoral college. James Corey's excellent contribution concludes, as many have, that abolition of the college and "direct popular election of the president is not a realistic prospect" (p. 166). This leaves two options for reform: counting the electoral vote in each state by congressional districts, with a bonus of two electoral votes to the candidate who wins the state's popular vote; and distributing the vote by a proportional plan--giving the candidates a percentage of the electoral vote in a state corresponding to their percentage of the popular vote. Corey does not opt for either alternative but notes that "the proportional plan would have thrown the presidential elections of 1960, 1968, 1992, and 1996 into the House of Representatives," which explains why "the major political parties have never given this system even a cursory look" (p. 160). The district plan would have produced the election of Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in 1960 and a flat tie between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter in 1976 and would have expanded George Bush's margin in 2000 to 287-251.

Glenn W. Rainey Jr. and Jane G. Rainey do have an electoral system choice. Their essay opts for a constitutional amendment that would abolish the two bonus (senatorial) electoral votes but otherwise allow states to continue the winner-take-all system. This would counteract what they see as the greatest defect of the current system: the fact that "[c]ontrary to assumptions in much political science literature, the small states have the advantage in the Electoral College" (p. 170).

Finally, Michael A. Genovese's delightful and incisive concluding essay states that as far as 2000 was concerned, "there just was not enough time for a fair and accurate recount" (p. 253). The only reform, then, that might have saved Al Gore was moving the inauguration of the president back to March 4.

Towson University

MARK WHITMAN