By Brian Carnell

Wednesday, November 8, 2000

The last time I heard from Michael Moore was the day before the election when I saw a pro-Nader campaign featuring Moore endorsing the Green Party candidate. Now that it looks like George W. Bush will most likely be the next president of the United States (though that is by no means assured at this point), Moore is suddenly concerned that Bush is "stealing" the election from Gore.

But they are also saying that, no matter if he has won the most votes, he may be denied the Presidency -- because of the Electoral College!

My fellow Americans -- we have to set aside our differences regarding Gore and Nader and demand, IMMEDIATELY DEMAND, that Bush step aside and not claim the Presidency based on this insane ancient Electoral College. The Electoral College was designed by the founding fathers who wrote it into the Constitution along with this rule: only white men who owned property and paid taxes would be allowed to vote.

The United States is no longer that country. This is a democracy. One person, one vote. We should have done away with this antique long before now. I guess no one ever thought it would come to a night like this.

What is Moore talking about? After ripping Bush and suggesting the Republican candidate did not even know how to read, Moore is the one coming across as a complete moron.

First, the appeal for Bush will not work largely because the Gore campaign itself rejected that approach. Before the election the big fear was that it was Al Gore who might win the electoral college vote but lose in the popular vote totals to Bush. Reporters who mentioned this scenario to Gore staffers were told flat out that the Constitution is the Constitution, end of story. Gore would be an extreme hypocrite to now say, oops we did not really mean that.

Besides which the argument makes no sense at all because the Electoral College itself dictates how candidates campaign (which it was designed to do as we shall see in a minute). If it were just the popular vote that counted rather than the Electoral College, both Bush and Gore would have run very different campaigns than they did (if the election was to be determined by the popular vote, for example, Bush would have devoted more time to Florida and Michigan and probably skipped Tennessee and Arkansas entirely in the last days of the campaign).

Moore also uses some fuzzy math. According to Moore, "Now, an hour later [4:45 a.m. Eastern], Gore has pulled out significantly ahead of Bush in the nationwide popular vote -- at last count, Gore leads Bush by over 260,000 votes -- and it continues to climb. Ten percent of California -- a state which Gore is winning big -- has yet to be counted. This will only add to his popular vote as the morning goes on." Actually just the reverse happened. With 99 percent of precincts reporting as of 2:58 p.m. Eastern, Gore is leading the popular vote by just under 168,000 votes.

Second, the claim that we should ignore the electoral college because it was written into the Constitution by white men makes absolutely no sense. Sure, maybe we should also get rid of the pesky First Amendment which was written by white men as well. Moore might want to try making an argument here rather than just stringing along non sequiturs. (He could start by finding the section of the Constitution which establishes the United States as a democracy. Does Moore really fail to realize that the United States was consciously created to be a representative republic rather than a strict democracy?)

This is especially the case since the Electoral College was created to benefit geographical minorities. Why did Bush go to Tennessee and Arkansas in the last few days of the election? Because they had electoral votes he needed to win. Take away the Electoral College and replace it with a straight up or down based on the popular vote and elections will be geared almost entirely to the ten to 12 largest states in the union.

Not that the Electoral College solution to the problem of having very large states and very small states is perfect. There is a variety of ways it could be improved including some that leftists have often suggested such as proportional representation. But trying to say that candidates should simply not accept an office because they won by adopting campaign strategies that reflect the Constitution's establishment of the Electoral College is absurd.

Finally, it is interesting that in the same column Moore wants to blame Bush's apparent victory in Florida on the bizarre ballots that were used in parts of Florida rather than the simple fact that if Gore gets all Nader's votes in Florida this whole debate is moot -- Gore gets declared the winner yesterday.

Moore tries to do some political jujitsu with exit poll data, but his math just doesn't add up. Moore doesn't cite the source of his exit polls, but exit poll data from Florida that interviewed 1,818 voters showed that a) Nader got less than one percent from people who had not voted in 1996, b) Nader got one percent of voters who describe themselves as Democrats, and c) Nader got three percent from voters who described themselves as liberals. Even more importantly, Nader got ten percent in exit polling data from people who had voted for Ross Perot in 1996 and four percent from people who described themselves as independents. Clearly Nader managed to siphon off some liberal and independent voters who were going likely to vote even if Nader had not been in the race and many of whom would have voted for Gore.

Which I do not think is a big deal -- it was not Nader's job to make sure Gore won. But Nader supporters should not have run around saying it doesn't matter who wins because both Gore and Bush are identical candidates, and then decide the day after that it suddenly does make a difference who controls the White House.

Source:

Stop Bush's Theft of the People's Will. Michael Moore. November 8, 2000.

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