If a voter enters a voting booth, puts his ballot on the floor, and proceeds to do nothing but an Indian rain dance around it before turning it in, should canvassing officials still be required to determine that voter's intent?
By the logic consuming the chaotic presidential election process in Florida, the answer would have to be "yes." And not just by partisan Democrats, but by just about everyone involved in the post-election melee there.
Republicans may argue, correctly, that when a vote can't be read by a machine it almost always means no vote was cast for that office, thus producing an "undervote." (There were almost 11,000 such undervotes for president in Miami-Dade County, which the Gore team desperately wants to count by hand though they were counted twice by machine, and some 1.25 million such undervotes across the country.)
Or, as many have argued, it's simply an impossible task for partisan people to correctly divine the "intent" of the voter by holding up partially dimpled chads to determine whether they are three, six, or nine months "pregnant."
But almost no one argues that it doesn't matter how a person intended to vote — it only matters how he actually voted. In other words, when a voter enters the voting booth, it's his responsibility to cast his ballot properly and according to the rules in order to make his vote absolutely clear. In the cases at hand in Florida, those rules told the voters in the counties that used punch-card balloting to make sure the chad was completely punched out.
In the now famous "butterfly ballot" case, in which many voters were not too embarrassed to later claim that they "voted wrong," the explanation of how to correctly use the ballot was even sent out ahead of time to the registered voters who would be using them. (Still, if a voter messes up a ballot on election day he may get a new one and do it correctly.)
I've wanted to ask just about every television talking head discussing this issue, particularly those partisan Democrats who keep drooling over the term "voter intent" when they are talking about microscopic scratches on chads, "does the voter have any responsibility whatsoever to vote properly and so make his intent objectively clear?"
Still, in the Florida election chaos, the chant has become "every vote should count" (which really means only ambiguous votes in Democratic counties). In our age of victimology, few dare say instead, "It's the responsibility of the voter to make his vote one which can clearly be counted."
The production of yet another pathetic American victim class, this time voters, may be one of the sorriest legacies of this election.
Betsy Hart, a frequent commentator on CNN and the Fox News Channel, can be reached by e-mail at: mailtohart@aol.com.