Something Rotten in the state of Florida
/Of the many weird and unsettling developments in
Florida since the presidential election meltdown four years ago, none
is so startling as the fact that Theresa LePore, the calamitously
incompetent elections supervisor of Palm Beach County, still has her
job. It was LePore who chose the notorious "butterfly ballot" - a
format so confusing that it led thousands of Democrats, many of them
elderly, retired Jewish people, to punch the wrong hole, giving their
vote not to Al Gore, as they had intended, but to the right-wing,
explicitly anti-Jewish fringe candidate Pat Buchanan. It was LePore,
too, who caused huge problems for the fraught re-count process, first
by insisting on the strictest standards for determining voter intent
and then, with the final deadline 72 hours away, ordering her staff to
take the day off for Thanksgiving. As a result, Palm Beach County fell
short of completing its manual re-count on time, and the whole process
- which even under LePore's strictures had turned up an extra 180 votes
for Gore - was rendered void. Arguably, no one person did more to foul
up the maddeningly close election in Florida in 2000, and no individual
bears more responsibility for the fact that George Bush ended up
President instead of Gore. (Without the butterfly ballot, Gore would
have taken as many as 7,000 more votes and cruised past Bush's official
537-vote margin of victory.) [more 
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