There it was, tucked away inconspicuously in the lower inside corner of page 14 in the first section of the Chicago Tribune for Friday May 11: "Ballot review yields Florida split decision." The story, by Martin Merzer, reported the results of a painstaking review of 176,000 Florida ballots rejected in the machine count on election day last November. In the study, conducted by The Miami Herald and several other Florida papers, USA Today, and Knight Ridder Newspapers, all the ballots were counted according to four different standards, ranging from more to less restrictive. "Bush would prevailed under the two most restrictive," Merzer reported: "His biggest margin would have been 407 votes under the standard most commonly accepted by states that use punch card ballots. It requires that two corners of a ballot's chad must be detached for the vote to count."
On the other hand, "Gore would have won under the two most permissive standards," Merzer wrote: "His biggest margin would have been 332 votes if dimpled chads, which bulge out but are still attached at all four corners, were considered valid votes."
So after all the furor it comes down to this thoroughly unsatisfactory resolution. The stolen election; the massive conspiracy to disenfranchise black voters; Gore's unshakable conviction, two weeks after the election, that he had won Florida by 20,000 votes or more: pure fantasy. How many of the commentators and partisans who waxed apocalyptic after Bush's victory will have the courage and the honesty to acknowledge now that they were simply wrong? (And would Republicans have behaved any better if Gore had won by several hundred votes?)
What to do in the face of such revelations? There has been a good deal of talk about the need for "election reform." In an April 6 editorial in response to a preliminary report on The Miami Herald study, The New York Times spoke gravely of the "stark evidence of how imprecise our voting system is." Certainly it is desirable that voting technology should be efficient and reliable, voter registration rolls meticulously accurate, and so on. But that would hardly eliminate the "imprecision" inherent in democracy.
Better to set the editorials and op-ed pieces aside and turn to the best piece of fiction on voting I have ever read, Italo Calvino's novella "The Watcher," published in Italian in 1963 and in English translation (The Watcher and Other Stories) in 1971.
"The Watcher" is set in the city of Turin in 1953. (An author's note by Calvino says that "the substance" of the story "is based on fact, but the characters are entirely imaginary.") The protagonist, Amerigo Ormea, is representing the Communist party as a poll watcher. Along with representatives from other political parties he is to ensure that voting in this important national election is carried out according to the law.
For Amerigo that poses a special challenge, for the polling place where he is assigned as an observer is the notorious Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables, a Catholic institution that shelters "unfortunates, the afflicted, the mentally deficient, the deformed, even creatures who are hidden, whom no one can see." Since the postwar democratic reforms, Amerigo relflects, such institutions have "served as great reservoirs of votes of for the Christian Democratic party," which dominates the coalition government:
at Cottolengo, above all, at each election instances were discovered of idiots being led to vote, or dying old women, or men paralyzed with arteriosclerosis, in any case people being unable to make logical distinctions. As a result of these instances, there was a crop of anecdotes, ranging from the burlesque to the pathetic: the voter who ate his ballot, the one who, finding himself in a booth with that piece of paper in his hand, thought he was in a latrine and behaved accordingly, or the line of slightly brighter retarded voters who entered the polls chanting the name of the candidate and his number on the ballot: "One two three: Quadrello! One two three Quadrello!"
Is this so different from what went on in Florida last November? In Chicago? Is it so different from what goes on in every U.S. election?
Unsentimental, blackly comic at times, yet also tender, the novella explores the paradoxes of democracy with a supple intelligence. A subplot concerns Amerigo's troubles with his pregant girlfriend, Lia. This part of the story, in contrast to its main thread, is quite dated now. But it is interesting to consider how Amerigo's desire for Lia to have an abortion is contradicted by his growing recognition of the full humanity of the residents of Cottolengo. The hospital undercuts false pieties about "the people," pieties of communism and democracy alike. And yet the result is not cynicism but rather a heightened sense of what is of value in our very imperfections.
By all means, then, let us make better voting machines, design better ballots. By all means let us treasure the right to vote. Democracy is a gift—but we should not take it, or ourselves, too seriously.
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John Wilson is editor of Books & Culture and editor-at-large for Christianity Today.
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