COURSE DESCRIPTION AND OUTLINE
Web
Page: garnet.acns.fsu.edu/~ldsmith
Contents
Preliminary Comments about the
Election Controversy
Computation
of grades
Group projects
Graduate
student research
Extra credit
Attendance
policy
Course Calendar, Materials, and
Readings
Appendix A: Central Concepts of
the Course
David
Colburn and Lance deHaven-Smith, Government in the Sunshine State: Florida
Since Statehood (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2000).
Vincent
Bugliosi, The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the
Constitution and Chose Our President (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press,
2001).
Most of the course materials will be available on the Internet. The one required text provides important
background information on Florida government and politics and also covers some
of the academic research and theorizing in the fields of public opinion,
environmental policy, voting behavior, elections, and language.
In the syllabus section titled “Course Calendar, Materials, and Reading,” documents, articles, books, and other items are listed under three different headings: (1) Read, (2) Auxiliary Materials, and (3) Suggested Reading for Graduated Students. All students should read and think about all of the items under the first heading (“Read”). Auxiliary Materials are books or documents that will be drawn on during the class discussions and lectures. Students may want to examine some of them, but there is no requirement to do so. Similarly, the items listed for graduate students are not mandated to be read for the course and are referenced simply for student information. However, anyone seeking a doctorate will want to have read them before taking their Comprehensive Exams.
While
exploring the relationship between law, politics, and mass media in the
disputed 2000 presidential election, this course exposes students to the three
most sophisticated political paradigms of the modern era. The term “paradigm,” was popularized by
Thomas Kuhn, a Twentieth Century philosopher of science, who explained that
scientific progress is characterized, not by a gradual accumulation of facts,
but by revolutionary shifts in perspective that change the direction of
inquiry, redefine issues and questions, and reinterpret prior findings. For example, a paradigm shift occurred in
physics when Newton’s theories were superceded by Einstein’s. Today, the term paradigm is used in
many ways both inside and outside of science, usually to describe holistic
patterns of thought that are taking shape or passing away.
This
course will be examining ideological patterns of thought, political activity,
and communication in American politics and society. For this purposes, a paradigm can be defined as a set of concepts and principles that applies to the
social world as a whole and delineates the basic units of society, the central
mechanism governing social change, the range of possible social forms, and the
category of individuals who control the levers of social transformation. I have described the structure of political
thought, and have suggested a methodology for assessing competing political
viewpoints, in Philosophical Critiques of Policy Analysis (University
Presses of Florida, 1989).
The three paradigms we
will cover in the course are the early-modern worldview of
the nation’s Founders; the social and political philosophy
implicit in contemporary social science; and the emergent paradigm referred
to as post-modernism.
Each of these paradigms highlights different aspects of the 2000
election and has different implications for political reform to prevent flawed
elections in the future or in other ways respond to the election
controversy. We will go through all of
the evidence from the 2000 election controversy, consider how it would be
interpreted from different partisan and paradigmatic orientations, and draw
judgments about why the controversy occurred, how it was resolved, and what it
all means for American government and politics. In the process, we will learn how to avoid being sucked into the
narrow partisan viewpoints that today are tyrannizing public discourse in
American and Florida politics.
The
course will conclude by synthesizing the findings from our investigations and
formulating some hypotheses about future developments in state and national
politics, for in significant respects the controversy surrounding the 2000
election is not yet over. Remaining to
be seen are how the electorate will respond in Florida's gubernatorial election
of 2002 and how the national electorate will respond in 2004. There is also the possibility, suggested by
post-modernism, that fundamental social conflicts are being avoided and will
reemerge suddenly in the future.
Preliminary Comments about
the Election Controversy
Clearly, Democrats and Republicans saw the disputed 2000 election
differently and found agreement almost impossible to reach. This was true in part because viewpoints
were distorted by partisan attachments, but it was also a result of the
perspectival character of political argumentation. In political disputes, people with different political
orientations do not simply disagree about the facts; indeed, they may agree
fully on the pertinent evidence. They
disagree about the importance to attach to each fact and hence about
what all of the facts mean collectively once each has been weighted
according to its significance. In the disputed
2000 election, Republicans and Democrats looked at the same events, and
everyone, regardless of political party, knew about chads, butterfly ballots,
Katherine Harris, and other particulars.
But the two sides drew different conclusions from the same observations,
because one side emphasized partisan efforts to block legally mandated
recounts, while the other side stressed apparent biases in the local
implementation of recounting procedures.
Both sides could point to visible evidence in support of their
positions, which is why it was easy for people to become completely captured by
the viewpoint corresponding to their partisan interests—“the facts” on which
they based their positions were deceptively obvious.
The problem addressed in this course is how to find the larger truth in
circumstances like these, when opinion has become polarized and blindly
partisan. Most educated Americans
believe that, in politics if not elsewhere, truth is found by examining any
given issue from different angles. Later
in the course, we will see that this epistemological prescription dates back to
the American Founders, who thought that political conflicts were to a great
degree irresolvable. In any event,
during the 2000 election controversy, having the same issue analyzed by
partisans, first from one angle and then from the other, was considered to be
the highest form of objectivity.
Actually, however, this strategy is both confusing and misleading. It is confusing, because it is like looking
at the world through crossed eyes. You
are being presented with viewpoints that are in conflict, which means that you
cannot see the issues from both perspectives at the same time. At best, you can switch back and forth
between images, but this does not tell you which, if either, viewpoint is most
accurate. Hence, listening to both
sides of a dispute seldom makes those who are disagreeing more reasonable. In fact, this kind of discourse seems to do
just the opposite; it reinforces partisan prejudices as each side listens more
attentively to its own reasoning and learns to rebut the reasoning of its
opponents.
But there is something far worse about an on-the-one-hand,
on-the-other-hand approach to objectivity than its tendency to reinforce
polarization. In the guise of fairness,
it is fundamentally and irremediably biased.
Even if a carefully balanced account of each issue is reconstructed from
partisan disputes, this approach is prejudiced in a higher sense, because it
presupposes that the particular issues of interest to the partisans are the
only, or at least the most important issues for the larger society. In reality, the situation in contemporary
American and Florida politics is exactly the reverse; the partisans argue intensely
about minor matters, while the most important questions are ignored.
In
the flawed 2000 presidential election, political analysis and argumentation
focused on a terribly narrow range of questions: Who had really won the election; whether statements and proposals
made by the campaigns were sincere; whether public officials were following the
law or instead subverting it for partisan ends; why many ballots were not
counted and who was benefiting as a result, and so on. All of these issues involved the mechanics,
criteria, and procedures for tabulating votes.
These may be important questions, but they are not the most
important, and they by no means exhaust the full range of issues raised by the
dispute and its controversial outcome.
As citizens concerned about the health of our republic and the security
of our personal liberties, we should want to know, for example,
These
kinds of questions are not raised in partisan politics, because the disputants
are, well, partisan. They are
locked in a contest for control of the world’s richest and most powerful
nation, and are backed financially by huge organizations with intense
motivations, vast resources, and high expectations. Even if all of the competitors have the best of intentions, they
inevitably become caught up in the contest and focus primarily on matters of
immediate significance to upcoming elections.
This is as true of Congress and the Florida Legislature as it is of
presidential and gubernatorial campaigns. The focus is on winning, not
governing. The consequence for our nation is that public discourse and the
public philosophy arising from it are myopic, distrustful, and blind to the
nation’s true needs and responsibilities.
There are only three ways to avoid becoming enslaved
by the narrow, partisan viewpoints stalking American (and Florida)
politics: Withdraw from political
activity altogether; become a self-righteous cynic who stays abreast of the
issues but views politics as a contest between liars; or formulate a larger
viewpoint—a paradigm--that articulates higher truths while subsuming and
relativizing partisan ideologies.
Naturally, the third way is to be preferred, and it is the path we will
take in this class. However, while
avoiding narrow mindedness, it, too, presents a danger, namely, the potential
to become captured by a higher-order philosophy that is itself partial and
misleading. To defend ourselves against
this possibility, we will consider three paradigms sequentially in the
historical order of their development, and in this way we will try to discover
how to learn from political experiences such as the flawed 2000 presidential
election. After all, this is really
what we as citizens are after. We want
to draw the appropriate lessons from the political experiences of times, and
apply these lessons to maintain if not enhance popular control of government,
individual liberty, and the rule of law.
The problem with partisanship is that, rather
than encouraging us to use our experiences to arrive at an increasingly exact
and full understanding of our government and society, it treats experience as
the mythological figure Procrustes treated his visitors. A huge, powerful, angry man, Procrustes
invited travelers who wandered past his house to come in, have dinner, and stay
the night. After they had eaten and
were ready to retire, he then caught them by surprise and put them in one of
his two beds. If they were short, he
gave them his large bed and stretched them to fit it, and if they were tall, he
put them in his small bed and sawed off as much of their legs as projected over
the end. In the same way, partisans are
not interested in a friendly search for truth.
Quite the opposite. They are
looking for people to dominate. They
insist on chopping or stretching every political fact to fit the Procrustean
bed of their partisan interests.
In the lifelong quest to for wisdom, you will
be assaulted by many Procrustean ideologues.
In preparation, you may wish to consider how Procrustes was eventually
done in. According to legend,
Procrustes was killed by Theseus, an Athenian hero who was reputed to have been
the inventor of wrestling. As
Procrustes came at him, Theseus skillfully flipping him into one of his own
beds and then did to him what he had done to others. Partisanship can be defeated in the same way, that is, by using
its own momentum to pull it forward into its own rigid, self-serving
logic. In other words, if you want to
be able, like Theseus, to out-wrestle ideological brutes, you must learn, not
so much the right answers as the right questions.
The
course has two basic aims. One is to
convey a wide range of information and ideas related to Florida politics and
American government. Topics include
public opinion theory and research; voting behavior and elections;
Constitutional law; political reporting and civic journalism; techniques of
political advertising and persuasion; the disputed presidential elections of
1800 and 1876; post-modernism in the social sciences; and more.
The
second objective is to help students rise above the narrow thinking and
ideological conformity in contemporary American and Florida politics. Our nation and this generation stand at
perhaps the most important place and time in human history. The scientific and technological advances
being made today are truly of mythological proportions. Like Prometheus stealing fire from the gods,
we, the created, have cracked the Creator’s code. But our discoveries are a mixed blessing. They have the potential to free the world
from hunger, disease, ignorance, and perhaps even death, but they could just as
easily culminate in complete destruction of the human spirit or of the human
species.
Our
scientific insights are as dangerous as they are promising, because they have
not been accompanied by comparable progress in politics and government. Three millennia ago when we were in our
cultural infancy, the primordial intuitions of humankind—conveyed in the
Genesis stories of the Tree of Life and the Tower of Babel, and the Greek
legends of Daedalus, Icarus, and Pandora as well as Prometheus--warned us that
the unbridled pursuit of knowledge would lead to our destruction. Prometheus, for taking the technology of the
gods, was chained naked to a pillar, on top of which was a vulture that tore at
his liver each day for eons. The pain
was unceasing, because every night as he suffered in the freezing darkness, his
liver grew whole again. Would an
eternity of organ transplants for an aged body be so different, especially if
we were chained to a life of meaningless toil and shallow entertainment? Perhaps the imbalance frighteningly apparent
today between technical power and human wisdom was inevitable. Perhaps humankind’s fundamental and
unalterable character is a disastrous combination of technical genius and
political stupidity. At the very least,
our discoveries are taking us into dangerous, if not forbidden territory.
But
who would know it? Who would know by
what is discussed in American and Florida politics that we are entering a realm
where our capacity to use knowledge wisely and with mercy will be tested as
never before and perhaps as never again?
Like primitive people torn between touching or running from a bright
flame, we debate whether to continue particular lines of scientific inquiry,
but not how to use for good the knowledge we already have and the discoveries
we will continue to make. America’s
vision, once formed through the eyes of soaring eagles carrying arrows of
justice in their claws, has become a frog’s eye view from a pond surrounded by
tall grass. Most of our leaders dwell
happily in a swamp of corrupting influences, oblivious to gray snakes
slithering through the shadows. My hope
is that students will learn to fly above this marsh on wings of great ideas, so
that they can see ahead into the kingdom of our expanding powers and help those
of lesser vision find the road, if not to heaven, at last to higher ground.
Students are expected to uphold the Academic Honor Code published in the
Florida State University Bulletin and the Student Handbook. The Academic Honor Code of The Florida State
University requires students to (1) uphold the highest standards of academic
integrity in their own work, (2) refuse to tolerate violations of academic
integrity in the university community, and (3) foster a high sense of integrity
and social responsibility.
Students with disabilities needing academic accommodation
should (1) register with and provide documentation to the Student Disability
Resource Center; and (2) bring a letter to the professors indicating the need
for accommodation and what type. This
should be done during the
Course
requirements differ for graduate and undergraduate students. All students will have a pre-midterm quiz, a
group research project, and a final exam.
Graduate students have an additional assignment to write a significant
research paper using quantitative data.
Computation
of grades. In the calculation of grades for undergraduates, the assignments
will be weighted as follows:
pre-midterm exam (20%); final exam (30%); group project (15% for group
presentation, 15% for group written report); preparation for and participation
in class (20%).
In
the calculation of grades for graduate students, the assignments will be
weighted: pre-midterm exam (20%); final
exam (20%); group project (20%); research paper (30%); and preparation for and
participation in class (10%).
Grade
equivalencies are: 100-93=A, 92-90=A-.
89-87=B+, 86-83=B, 82-80=B-, 79-77=C+, 76-73=C, 72-70=C-, 69-67=D+, 66-63=D,
62-60=D-, 59-0=F.
Group projects. Students
will be divided into teams to conduct and present original research designed
around ideas developed in class discussions.
The ideas will be drawn from post-modernism. Basically, for purposes of the group projects, we will be
investigating the possibility that the electorate is suffering from something
comparable to the temporary and incomplete amnesia experienced by victims of
trauma. Today, the citizenry seems to
be behaving just like it did after the assassination of President Kennedy, when
no one could imagine the possibility of a conspiracy, even though the murder
occurred in the home state of the Vice President (the principal beneficiary of
the murder), eye witnesses reported seeing more than one shooter, and the
alleged assassin was killed while in police custody but before he could be
interrogated. In the group projects, we
will be exploring the possibility that nations, like individuals, have
unconscious defense mechanisms that prevent them from seeing the obvious while
they are still shaken up.
Possible topics for group
projects include:
(1)
The spiral of
silence. This concept comes from the work of Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann,
who argues that public opinion possesses normative force, that is, people will
tend to conform to prevailing opinions once those opinions are known. The “spiral of silence” occurs when those
with dissident views begin to see themselves as isolated and respond by growing
silent. Research on this silencing
would involve quantifying the rapid decline in discussion of the election after
the Supreme Court's ruling. Students
would select several newspapers (e.g., 2 national, 2 Florida) to examine and
then would measure the column inches devoted to the dispute in each paper on
each day after the election, noting the location of the items (front page,
editorial, etc). The data would be
compiled into a dataset and analyzed to identify when the silencing began,
which papers grew silent first (national or local), whether the silence was
total or involved both reporting and editorializing, etc.
(2)
Mechanisms of memory repression. Trauma
victims typically have troubling, flashback-like memories of isolated moments,
but the victims cannot recall the overall flow of events during which these
incidents occurred. The traumatized
mind appears to protect the victim by keeping the memories fragmented and
isolated, so that they do not all hit the person at the same time. This same process of memory segregation may
occur for collective trauma. Students
would investigate this possibility by tracking the effects of post-election
studies and investigations, some of which have exposed illegal, unethical, or
suspicious activities that occurred during the election controversy but that
did not come to light until later.
Questions to ask would include: Are these discoveries made in isolation
or do they build sequentially one from the next? Do news stories about each study link the findings to those of
other studies, or is each study treated as an isolated datum? Both the New York Times and the Washington
Post have written accounts of the whole controversy. Do these synthesize the isolated findings
(flashback memories) of the various studies?
If not, what is the overall conceptualization of the election outcome?
(3)
Mechanisms for processing post-traumatic stress. There are at least two autonomic mechanisms for relieving the post-traumatic
stress of individuals: dreams or
hallucinations, and humor. With respect
to collective post-traumatic stress from the election, each of these would
probably warrant its own study.
a)
Hallucinations. An example
of a collective hallucination is a rumor, a disturbing story about the event
that takes on a life of its own and becomes enmeshed in the ongoing
interpretation of subsequent events.
This study would involve inventorying and analyzing the rumors that have circulated
around the election controversy and those involved in. Once the rumors have been collected, the
analysis would involve deconstructing the rumors to identify the
presuppositions and thought patterns behind them. Some questions to ask include:
What evidence was cited to give credence to the rumors? How is the lack of confirmation
explained? Looking at all of the rumors
together, how is the political process being implicitly characterized? If the rumor were thought of as wish, what
would the wish be?
b)
Humor. Freud's second book was on humor, which he
explained as an unexpected jump from one train of thought to another. This was not unlike the account of dreams
offered in his first book, which showed how infantile urges repressed during
waking hours are turned into metaphorical images during sleep so that the
wishes are satisfied symbolically in a code that eludes the conscious mind and
its critical voice. What is the
character of the humor about the 2000 election controversy? Answering this question would require
collecting as many examples as possible, and then analyzing the examples by
developing a categorization of jokes and explicating the logic of each
type. For example, some jokes may
exaggerate certain characteristics of the candidates that have been criticized,
such as George Bush's tendency to coin new words and Al Gore’s propensity for
fudging details. Other jokes may
mischievously lead the listener unawares to a conclusion about a candidate’s
weaknesses. Another category of jokes
would be those about Floridians. The
key would be to try to understand what this humor accomplishes in relation to
the anxiety and stress generated by the controversy.
Graduate student research. The
graduate research paper should replicate and extend or challenge one of the
many analyses that came out in the election’s aftermath. Examples of the issues that have been
studied so far and warrant additional work include:
Quantitative data should be
used wherever practical. It can be
original data gathered by the student or data available in the course
materials. Computer analysis of the
data would be required for large data sets but not for simple comparisons of
variations across counties, voting machines, etc. There is no required length for the papers; short analyses (5 –
10 pages counting tables and figures) are fine. The important consideration is to raise an important question,
collect the best data you can find for addressing it, analyze the data
properly, write up the results clearly and succinctly, and document all sources
with endnotes or other appropriate references.
Extra credit. All students have
two opportunities for extra credit to improve their grades. The extra credit assignment is to locate,
copy, and bring to class a research report or important piece of investigative
journalism that appears after the course begins or that has already been
published but is not listed in the syllabus.
For each item brought in and accepted by the professor, the student will
have five points added to his or her lowest grade.
Attendance policy. Students
are expected to attend all classes. The class meets only once each week, so
missing one class is the equivalent of missing a week of coursework. Absences will be excused only for medical
reasons or travel required for work or professional development. One unexcused absence will lower your grade
by one step (e.g., if you were to receive an “A-,” your final grade would be
“B+” instead.) Each additional absence
will incur a further one-step reduction in your grade.
Aug.
27: Introduction
Sept. 4: The
Paradigm Implicit in the Election Dispute
Sept. 11: Paradigms of Social Science and
Post-Modernism
Sept. 18: Competing Views of the Historical Context
Sept. 25: History as Memory and Amnesia
Oct. 9: The Essence of Political
Communication
Oct. 16: The Election, the Recount, and the Mass Media
Oct. 23: The Recount, the Appeals, and the
Florida Legislature
Oct. 30: Checks and Balances in the Election
Contest
Nov. 6: The Search for Closure
Nov. 13: Containing the Post-Controversy Controversy
Nov. 20: Studies of the Election
Nov. 27: Group
Project Presentations – Reports and Grad Papers Due
Dec. 4: Prognosis for American and Florida
Politics
Dec. 10-15: Exam Week (check University schedule
for exam date and time)
Student and Professor introductions.
Course
assignments.
Overview
of theoretical orientations to the election dispute.
Brief
recap of the election controversy.
Class
discussion about the main points of disagreement during and after the dispute,
the origins of the different positions, the absence of middle-ground positions,
the inverse relationship between intensity and information, the power of
metaphors, and the sudden silence after the election was decided.
The theory-laden character of political discourse: policy
concepts; policy frameworks; political ideologies (history and human nature) in
election speeches. For an example
related to the flawed 2000 presidential election, ttudents may wish to read the
brief by Wasserman to the U.S. Supreme Court
about competing definitions of a “vote.”
Another example of a gestalt-laden concept from the
election: “voter error.”
The structure of political paradigms: Posit crucial dimension of variation;
delineation of systemic options; prescriptions for moving from one option to
another; political ideas; political audience.
Note: Labor Day Weekend
Read: This syllabus.
Sept. 4: The Paradigm Implicit in the Election Dispute: The
Founders Presuppositions writ Modern
Review of the structure of political paradigms
The paradigm of the American Founders: Natural differences between classes; Best
social order allows class circulation; Class conflict is natural and good as
long as it is contained; the system of checks and balances processes class
conflict.
Traces of the Founders’ paradigm in the election
controversy: No concern about partisan
disagreement; no concern about class divisions; acceptance of partisanship of
various elements in the federal system (despite disappointment with U.S.
Supreme Court).
The pervasiveness of the Founders’ paradigm: Politics treated as a spectator sport, a
contest involving maneuvers within the federal system; the public is viewed as
a fly-eyed observer, each class capable of recognizing its interests and
forming judgments for strategic action; issues are treated in isolation, and
political analysis is seen as understanding the issue from each class/partisan position.
Political communication: provide information to distinct
classes/groups about their interests within the system and with respect to
specific issues. Information is
issue-specific, interest-oriented, strategic, and factual from a class/group
position.
Political practice:
Mobilize the un-mobilized, organized the unorganized, give (some) power
to the powerless. But this should
exclude mobilization to affect the overall system of checks and balances. If the system is out of balance, losing
groups will eventually combine to make a change, but this should be difficult
and seen as a last resort. If the rules
of the game come into play, the Republic is likely to degenerate into a tyranny
of the right or the left, the few or the many.
Norms for political candidates and public officials: Compete aggressively but not illegally, and
don’t “run out the clock”(?); bow out gracefully, i.e., do not be a “Gore
Loserman.”
Read:
The Founders’ Paradigm
The Declaration of Independence, 1776
The Media Recap of the Election
Washington Post series on the election Post
Series Post_Series_2
New York Times series on the overseas ballots NY Times_1 NY_Times_2
Bugliosi,
None Dare Call It Treason
The Norms of the Candidates
Inaugural
Speech of President George W. Bush
Selection
from Dirchowitz
Public Opinion
Auxiliary Materials:
Lance deHaven-Smith and
Randall B. Ripley, “The Political-Theoretical Foundations of Public Policy,” in
Edward B. Portis and Michael B. Levy, eds., Handbook of Political Theory and
Policy Science (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 1988).
Excerpt from the 1964
Economic Report of the President Economic Report of Pres
Political Staff of the Washington Post (2001). Deadlock: The
Inside Story of America’s Closest Election (New York: Perseus Books, 2001).
Suggested Reading for Graduate
Students:
Jurgen Habermas (1968, 1971). Knowledge
and Human Interests. Translated by Jeremy J. Shapiro. Boston: Beacon Press.
Kuhn, Thomas S. (1962). The Structure of
Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1966). Beyond Good and Evil:
Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Trans. by Walter Kaufmann. New
York: Vintage Books.
Strauss, Leo (1989). The Rebirth of Classical
Political Rationalism- An Introduction to the Thought of Leo Strauss.
Selected and Introduced by Thomas L. Pangle. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.
Weber, Max (1958).
The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Scribner.
The paradigm implicit in mainstream social science: Discussion
of the necessity of criteria for selecting subject matters; the subject matters
of the social sciences; the paradigm implicit in these subject matters; the
political practice and communication strategy implicit in this paradigm.
Social
science as a critique of the accepted view (the Founders’ paradigm): Humans have equal potential; differences in
initiative and ability reflect social malfunctions (nutrition, childrearing,
etc.); Political disagreements occur when reason is distorted by interests;
Government is an arm of “the public,” a collective subjectivity achieved by
reasoning individuals attending to the same debates;
Issues and options can be
divided into general and special. The
best social order promotes collective agreement, addresses general concerns,
and carries out the will of the general populace.
Communication:
Identify general interests and groups blocking these interests. Speak to all about what is best for most.
Practical
orientation: Remove or mitigate those factors that rob groups and individuals
of their human potential. This involves
a focus on child rearing, education, public awareness, etc,
Post-modernism: Discussion of the privileged status granted
to modern culture and science in the modern account of history and
epistemology.
Identification
of the power implicit in subjective identifications: Man, woman, teacher, student, criminal, deviant, employer,
etc. Note how the “naming theory of
language” takes these power relations to be natural. Social science seeks to understand the character of these
referents (e.g., the character of “the poor.”), not the origins of the
categories themselves.
Social
formations are organized around learning processes. Social formations vary in the questions they allow to be
asked. The best social formation would
allow all questions, all subjectivities, and complete individuation.
Communication:
destabilize the concepts and categories that reinforce and conceal relations of
power and privilege. This involves
raising suppressed questions or tracking seemingly objective categories back to
their origins in power. Note the use of
irony.
Practical
orientation: Focus on concept
creation. This can be by inverting
existing concepts or introducing new concepts that carry new social relations.
Read:
Comparing
Paradigms
deHaven-Smith, “Chapter 1” to Philosophical Critiques of
Policy Analysis
Example of the Scientific Paradigm in Action
MacManus et al., Post-Election
Survey
Suppressed Questions
Is the Bush family part of the
military-industrial complex about which President Eisenhower warned Americans
in his farewell address?
Conflict of Interests in the Persian Gulf War
House Resolution to Impeach President George W.H Bush
Governor Jeb
Bush’s letter of recusement
Was there a conspiracy to disenfranchise African
Americans?
USCRC Letter
Regarding “One Florida”
Status
Report on the 2000 Election, U.S. Civil Rights Commission
Documents related to culling the voter
registration rolls to remove felons and other ineligibles
NY Times Account of Poll Problems
NY
Times Account of Machine Errors in Black Precincts/Counties
Chart showing voting equipment,
undervote, race, age, by county
Brief by the American
Civil Rights Union in the first U.S. Supreme Court Case
Gadsden County advertised ballot and the ballot actually used
Investigative Report in the London Guardian
and a brief editorial alleging a conspiracy by
Harris and Jeb Bush prior to the election to cut black voting strength
Was
there an intentional failure to address a known problem?
Florida
1995 study of voting fraud
1991 Western Political Quarterly
article on voter error associated with punch card voting system
The frequency of uncertain election outcomes
(report from the National Commission on Federal Election Reform)
Congressional Study of Voting Technology
Litigation against the 2001 Florida
Election Reform Act
Was there a conspiracy to alter the overseas vote by facilitating
military voting after the election was over?
UNC Study
showing the “Republicanization” of the military
Gov. Jeb Bush’s letter encouraging
absentee voting
NY Times story about Bush’s
Florida lawyers and Harris’ “advisors”
Orlando Sentinel story on special treatment
of mangled overseas ballots
Effect of Bush pressure on overseas
ballot totals (May want to reread New York Times series on
the overseas ballots NY Times_1 NY_Times_2)
Harris reformats hard drives and NY
Times after Investigation of Harris hard drives
Stars and Stripes story about overseas ballots
being delivered after the election was over
Brief from Robert Harris et al (from the
second U.S. Supreme Court Case, Bush v. Gore, regarding rule giving a
10-day grace period to overseas ballots.
Shows that the 10-day grace period was unlawful)
Brief from Coalition
for Local Sovereignty (from the first case, Bush v. Gore, arguing that the
federal overseas voter law does not apply to presidential elections and
therefore the 10-day grace period cannot be granted under Florida law)
Was there a conspiracy to stop the Miami-Dade Recount?
NY Times Account
of Recount Stop (story appears Nov 24)
NY Times regarding Pinelas
rumors
Was a revote rejected arbitrarily?
Brief on behalf of
disenfranchised voters (from the first U.S. Supreme Court case, this brief
requests a revote or a full, statewide recount)
Auxiliary Materials:
Lance deHaven-Smith and Randall B. Ripley, “The Political Theoretical
Foundations of Public Policy,”
Farmer, David John (1995). The Language of Public Administration: Bureaucracy, Modernity,
and Postmodernity. Tuscaloosa, AL:
The University of Alabama Press.
Fox, Charles J. And Hugh T. Miller (1995). Postmodern Public Administration: Toward
Discourse. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
The Academy of Sciences of the USSR and the Academies
of Sciences of the Union Republics, A Scholars’ Guide to Humanities and
Social Sciences in the Soviet Union (New York: Longman, 1985).
William W. Eaton, The Sociology of Mental
Disorders (Westport, Connecticut: Praeger, 2001).
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Jay, Martin (1973). The Dialectical Imagination.
Boston: Beacon Press.
Leo Strauss, (1989). Liberalism Ancient and
Modern. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press. (Originally published 1968: Basic Books).
Sept. 18: Competing Views of the Historical Context
Drawing boundaries around the campaign and the electoral
context. Is GWHB part of the context? JEB?
Clinton? One Florida? Connerly?
Elian? Castro? Janet Reno?
Nixon? Lee Harver Oswald?
The history of presidential elections nationally and in
Florida.
Is race the central issue in American national
politics? The role of the South. Effect on public discourse before, during,
and after the election.
Read:
Background
deHaven-Smith
and Colburn, pp. 1-76.
Nikolitis v. Nicosia, regarding Attorney General
opinions
Platform
of the Republican Party
Platform
of the Democratic Party
Campaign Finance Data
List
of Bush Pioneers Bush_Pioneers.htm
Quarterly Reports of funds raised and spent
Income summary to August 2000
Expenditure summary to August 2000
Grand Totals through 2000
Contested elements of the historical context
Felon disenfranchisement in the states (report
from the National Commission on Federal Election Reform)
Janet Reno report on Gore fundraising
The
Bush syndicate
Bush Description
of Gore reneging on his election-night concession
Atavistic
remnants of the antebellum South
Auxiliary Materials:
Lamis, Alexander P. The Two Party South- Second
Expanded Edition. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Joseph A. Aistrup, The Southern Strategy
Revisited: Republican Top-Down Advancement in the South (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1996).
George R.
Bentley, “The Political Activity of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Florida,” The
Florida Historical Quarterly (July 1949), pp. 28-37.
Earl Black and Merle Black, Politics and Society
in the South (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard College, 1987).
V.O. Key, Southern Politics in State and Nation
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1984—first published in 1949).
David Colburn and Jane L. Landers, eds., The
African American Heritage of Florida (Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1995).
Jeffrey Rogers Hummel, Emancipating Slaves, Enslaving
Free Men: A History of the American Civil War (Chicago: Open Court, 1996).
Robert Kerstein, Politics and Growth in
Twentieth-Century Tampa (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001).
Larry Eugene Rivers, Slavery in Florida:
Territorial Days to Emancipation (Gainesville: University Press of Florida,
2000).
C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974—first published in 1955).
C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South,
1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1971—first
published in 1951).
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race,
Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991).
Edward G. Carmines and James A. Stimson, Issue Evolution:
Race and the Transformation of American Politics (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1989).
Hannah Arendt, Between Past and
Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Middlesex: Penguin Books,
first published in 1954).
Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization
Sept. 25: History as Memory and Amnesia
Post-modern account of the election controversy.
Issue suppression through issue conceptualization.
Conveying systemic images through issue constellations.
Collective post-traumatic amnesia. Examples in American History. In Florida History.
Mechanisms of Memory Repression: Fragmentation; Direct Repression;
Distraction; Phobia.
Evolving memories of the election dispute. How did the controversy escalate? Effects of: Clinton pardons; inaugural
demonstrations; Feeney’s comments about Gore concession; Saturday Night Live,
etc.
Discussion of student projects.
Read:
Example from American History
Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address
Florida Declaration of Secession
South
Carolina Ordinance of Secession
Example of Amnesia in Florida History
Study for the Legislature
on the Rosewood Massacre
Gainesville Sun article on legislative
compensation to Rosewood victims and descendents
Forgotten events preceding and following the disputed 2000 election
Chad-related election controversy in 1982
New Yorker Magazine article about problems with punch cards
Tampa Tribune story about vote
tabulation problems in June 1993 involving the mayoral race for the City of
St. Petersburg, Florida
Miami
Herald Report Saying Gore Won Study
Conflict at the Very Beginning: Who Caused the Dispute to Escalate?
Miami-Dade certified vote on 11/07/00, 118 pp., pdf
(pp. 30-148 of 2808ao)
Miami-Dade Precinct Reports showing undervote and
overvote (11/09/00), pdf (2808-59, pp. 23-55).
Conflicting recounts in Nassau Co (11/08/00), 4
pp., pdf (attached to 2808ae)
Statement of Bush a few days after the election
Statement of Bush Campaign Team a few days
after the election
NY Times story about Gore and
Bush using former Secretaries of State as spokespersons
Motion of Volusia Canvassing Board to
delay deadline in submitting returns (11/13/00)
Early Public Comments and Media Accounts
Bush and Gore Team comments re Harris
deadline for recount
NY Times story on John Ellis calling the
election for Bush on election night
Gore
TV speech proposing statewide recount (11/14)
Bush TV Speech rejecting Gore proposal
(11/14)
Behind the Scenes Maneuvering to Block/Unblock PB County Recount
Division of Elections Opinion 00-11 to Repub Party re PB
Co recount being unlawful (11/13/00)
Letter from PB Co Canvassing Bd to Attorney General
requesting opinion (11/13/00), attached to 2700n.
Attorney
Gen, Statement Re Absentee Ballots, etc. (11/14/00)
Circuit
Ct. Ruling in Volusia Case (11/14/00), 9 pp. pdf, (2700h).
Gore Request for Manual Recounts in Palm Bch Co.
(11/14/00)
Harris Intervenes
Harris Statement regarding deadline (11/13/00)
Clay Roberts memo to PB Co Canvassing Board setting
deadline 7 days after election (11/13/00)
Letter from Harris to Co Supervisors of Elect re
decision “not to exercise her authority” (11/15/00) see Exhibit B.
Harris memo of law on Volusia motion (11/16/00)
Transcript
of Burton statement on CNN, (11/16/00, 2:22 pm)
Republican Shoving in Broward
Bush
lawyer (Sherer) on CNN (11/16/00) in contrast with Fla Supreme Court Ruling
Gore complaint about Scherer media
statements (11/16/00)
Rumors
NY
Times regarding Pinelas rumors
Auxiliary Materials:
Gotz Aly, The Final Solution: Nazi Population
Policy and the Murder of European Jews, translated from the German by
Belinda Cooper and Allison Brown (London: Arnold, 1999).
David Bankier,
The Germans and the Final Solution: Public Opinion Under Nazism (Oxford:
Blackwell, 1996).
Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A
New History (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Robert S. McNamara, Argument
Without End (New York: Perseus, 1999).
Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle
Tom’s Cabin.
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Antonio Gramsci, The Antonio Gramsci Reader,
edited by David Forgacs (New York: New York University Press, 2000).
Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian
Impression (Chicago: The University
of Chicago Press, 1996).
Lippman, Walter (1922). Public Opinion. New
York: The Free Press..
Fred Weinstein, History and Theory After the Fall:
An Essay on Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).
Bruce Wilshire, “Mimetic Engulfment and Self-Deception,” in Brian P.
McLaughlin and Amelie Oksenberg Rorty, Perspectives on Self-Deception
(Berkely: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 390-404
October 2: Midterm Exam
October 9: The
Essence of Political Communication
Mass belief systems and issue publics.
Issue publics in Florida.
The structure of mass political communications (polar
images, implied motives, calls for action, single issues).
Analysis of previous Florida elections: Chiles v.
Martinez, Chiles v. Bush, Bush v. MacKay, Clinton v. Bush, Clinton v. Dole
Analysis of Bush v. Gore, with special attention to
communication: Bush denial of cocaine
use; Gore’s return to Carthage; Bush’s notion of an “education recession”; Gore
on “the lock box”; Bush and “fuzzy math”.
Importance of the media in shaping candidate images.
Initial consideration of media role in shaping
perceptions of the 2000 election dispute.
Read:
Background
Colburn
and deHaven-Smith, 118-145.
deHaven-Smith,
“Chapter One,” The Florida Voter
The Party Platforms
The Democratic Party Platform 2000
The Republican Party Platform 2000
Campaign Interviews
Bush on his alleged cocaine use
The Debates
Creating a Political Spectacle
James Baker contra Florida
Supreme Court after it overrules Harris deadline
Bush criticizing Florida
Supreme Court decision to overrule Harris
Feeney press conference statements
after Florida Supreme Court overrules Harris (see also my comments deconstructing
Feeney’s remarks) and article on Feeney’s
connection to the Bush legal team
Bush response to U.S. Supreme Court vacating
Florida Supreme Court decision (mentions Florida Legislature)
McKay press conference announcing special
legislative session one day before Florida Supreme Court rules on Gore
appeal of trial court decision
Avoiding a Political Spectacle
Brief requesting use of
cameras in Federal Courts for this case (denied)
Polling Data from the
Campaigns through the Election
Polls from October
1999 to June 2000
Polls from June to September 2000
Converse, P.E.
(1964). “The Nature of Belief Systems
in Mass Publics.” In Ideology and Discontent, edited by D.E. Apter. New York: The Free Press.
deHaven-Smith, Lance
(1996) The Florida Voter.
Tallahassee, FL: Florida Institute of Government.
Peter Golding, Graham
Murdock, and Philip Schlesinger, Communicating Politics: Mass Communications
and the Political Process (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1986).
Smith, Eric R. A. N. (1989). The Unchanging
American Voter. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Al Gore, Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit (New
York: Penguin Books, 1993).
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Adorno, Theodore W., Else Frenkel-Brunswick, Daniel
J. Levinson, and R. Nevitt. (1950). The Authoritarian Personality. N.Y.:
Harper, 1950.
Mannheim, Karl (1936). Ideology and Utopia. London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig (1953). Philosophical
Investigations. N.Y.: The Macmilliam Co.
October
16: The Election, the Recount and
the Mass Media
The social construction of the election controversy: Thematization through embedded frames, i.e.,
sports analogies, cowboy culture, Mickey Mouse, 1001 Dalmations, banana
republics, etc.
Elements
framed: Dueling Secretaries of State;
secluded candidates; wicked officials; demonstrating Cubans; seniors; etc.
Elements
un-framed: Jeb, accusations of racial discrimination; illegal campaign
activities in Seminole, etc.
The mass media: Needs of; Limitations of; Manipulation
of; Impact on conceptualization.
The character of public opinion.
Strategies of Bush and Gore.
Read:
Background
Colburn
and deHaven-Smith, pp. 77-117.
Congressional
hearings on TV coverage (hearings not yet published)
National Map of Election Returns
AP Story with survey of supervisors showing undervote
and overvote by county (11/21/00)
How the states count ambiguous votes
(report from the National Commission on Federal Election Reform)
Public Statements by the Campaigns
Harris comments on Nov 14 and
Nov 15
Harris Says Will Not
Accept Returns
Threats by the
Florida Legislature
More Threats by the
Legislature
Florida Supreme Court
Gore
Memo Contra Harris (11/16/00)
Oral Arguments before Fla Supreme Court re: Harris
Deadline (11/20/00)
Gore remarks after Florida Supreme Court
overrules Harris deadline
The overseas ballots
Duvall and other County returns showing problems with
military absentee ballots, plus Att General Letter changing rules
(11/20/00),
Bush Filing re Absentee Military Ballots (11/22/00)
Attorney General Response to Bush Ab.Ballot Filing
(11/27/00), 6 pp., pdf (2799d)
Bush Withdrawal of Military Ballots Suit
(11/27/00)
Missing Votes in Nassau County
NY Times Story in the Vanishing 218 Ballots
The Miami-Dade Decision to End Its Recount
NY Times Account of Recount Stop (story
appears Nov 24)
Media petition to Miami-Dade Canv. Bd., to
observe recount after Board moves to new room – see p. 102. (11/22/00)
Transcript of Hearing by Miami-Dade Canvassing Board
where Recount is Stopped (excerpts in 2808ao)
Transcript of CNN interview of Leahy re Dade
decision to stop recount (11/25/00), see p. 103.
Lieberman comments about
Miami demonstration and recounts being stopped in Miami-Dade Count
Bush Appeal of Florida Supreme Court Decision Overruling Harris Deadline
Orders from the U.S.
Supreme Court granting certiorari
Appendix to the Responses of
Lepore et al (opposing Bush)
Brief from the Florida
Senate arguing against the Florida Supreme Court
Butterworth brief and Butterworth brief replying to other
briefs in support of the Florida Supreme Court
Harris brief and Harris brief responding to other briefs
in support of Bush
Transcript of Oral Arguments to U.S.
Supreme Court regarding Deadline Extension
U.S. Supreme Court Remand to Florida Supreme Court
New York Times Analysis of
election-day voting in each state
Donations to Gore for Recount (damaged, cannot
open)
Federal and State Election Laws
State by state election returns
John R. Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
E.J. Dionne Jr. and William Kristol, eds., Bush v. Gore: The Court
Cases and the Commentary (Washington, DC: Brookings, 2001).
Murray Edelman, Constructing the Political Spectacle (Chicago:
University ofChicago Press, 1988).
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Berger, Peter L. And Thomas Luckman (1966). The
Social Construction of Reality. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.
Jacques Ellul, Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, translated
from French by Konrad Kellen and Jean Lerner (New York: Vintage Books, 1965).
Jurgen Habermas(1996). The Structural Transformation of the
Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of
Bourgeois Society. Translated by
Thomas Burger. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Mark Turner, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).
October 23: The
Appeals, the Trial, and the Florida Legislature
Florida election law.
Federal election law.
Judicial precedents regarding manual recounts: Florida
and federal.
The Florida Constitution.
History and importance of the principle of separation of
powers.
Relationship between Legislative, Judicial, and Executive
Branches in the 2000 election. Questions
about the motives, effects, and legality of the actions by the Florida
Legilsature.
Read:
Background
Florida Election Law
as of 2000
Certification of
the Election
Official
Election Certification (11/26/00), 2 pp., pdf (attached to 2808ae)
Harris and Others’ Comments at Certification
Hearing
Gore press comments a few hours before certification
Bush TV speech immediately after election
certified
Gore TV speech explaining why he will contest the
election
Lieberman comments about the need to contest the
election
Gore Press meeting before certification trial
about request to Florida Supreme Court
Gore comments on 60 Minutes regarding Seminole case
Gore news conference after trial court
loss but before Florida Supreme Court rules on his appeal
Boise Comments After Losing Contest Trail in
Circuit Court
Certification Transcript
The Circuit Court Trial to Contest the Election
Judge Sauls’ Run-In
with the Florida Supreme Court
Harris
et al response to Contest (11/30/00)
Expert
Testimony of Nicolas Hengartner in Contest Trial
Bush
critique of Hengartner Report
Expert
Testimony of Kimball Brace in Contest Trial, 11 pp., pdf (2808q)
Patent
Application for the new Punch-Card
System
Final
Judgment in Contest Trail
Transcript of
Final Judgment being explained by the Judge (12/5)
The Appeal to the Florida Supreme Court
Oral Argument before Fla Supreme Ct re: Trial Court
Loss
Final Judgment of Fla Supreme Court overruling
trial court and mandating statewide recount
Robert Michels on Anti-Democratic Tendencies of Political Parties
Ron Christenson, Political Trials: Gordian Knots in the Law (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999).
William E.
Nelson, “Fourteenth Amendment (Framing),”in Leonard W. Levy, Kenneth L. Karst,
and Dennis J. Mahoney, Civil Rights and Equality: Selections from the Encyclopedia
of the American Constitution (Macmillan Publishers, 1989), pp. 118-124.
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancience and Modern: The Ancien Regime in
Classical Greece (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1994).
October
30: Checks and Balances in the
Election Contest
Historical
precedents: Disputed elections of 1800
and 1876.
The “second U.S. Constitution” after the 14th
Amendment.
Questions about the motives of U.S. Supreme Court.
Assessment of the Florida Supreme Court.
The logic of the legal appeals process: Enough rope to hang yourself.
Read:
Background Information
How the states handle election disputes
(from National Commission for Federal Election Reform)
Federal authority to regulate
elections (report from the National Commission on Federal Election Reform)
Overview of Legal Flow (from NY Times)
Saber Rattling by Republicans Leading the Florida Legislature
Joint Resolution Calling Special Session
Reactions to the Florida Supreme Court
Mandate for Statewide Recount
Beginning the Statewide Recount of Undervotes
Transcript of Hearing on Statewide Recount Procedures
where “non-votes” are confusingly discussed (12/9/00)
Transcript of Sancho giving Florida Statewide Recount
Procedures, (12/9/00)
Bush Appeals on Equal Protection Clause Rejected at Lower Levels
Federal Circuit Court of Appeals refuses to
intervene or grant injunction (12/6)
Federal District Court
of Appeals refuses to intervene (12/6)
Butterworth contra
Bush appeal to U.S. Supreme Court
Florida Democratic Party
contra Bush appeal to U.S. Supreme Court
The U.S. Supreme Court Intervenes
Motion
asking the U.S. Supreme Court to intervene
Motion asking U.S.
Supreme Court for expedited action
U.S. Supreme Court Order
denying motion to expedite
Transcript of Oral Arguments to U.S.
Supreme Court over Statewide Recount
Early
Bush Motions Motions
Bush motion requesting a stay
(to stop statewide recounts) and Bush supplementary
materials for stay request
U.S. Supreme Court order granting stay, with
Stevens’ dissent
Alabama brief regard Roe v. Alabama (about
changing law after election)
Brennan Center Brief (about Legislative
intervention)
Butterworth Brief in Bush v. Gore
(on voter intent and Court role as defined by the Florida Legislature
Brief from the National Bar Association
Brief from Robert Harris et al
(regarding rule giving a 10 day grace period to overseas ballots)
U.S. Supreme Court Per Curium Decision
Renquist et al. concurring
opinion
Subsequent
Public Statements of Justices Article
Alan M. Dershowitz, Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked
Election 2000 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Colton C. Campbell and John F. Stack Jr., eds., Congress Confronts
the Courts: The Struggle for Legitimacy and Authority in Lawmaking (New
York: Roman and Littlefield, 2001).
Taylor et al., v Martin Co
Canvassing Bd (12/1/00) pdf. (2850a)
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Ron Christenson, Political Trials: Gordian Knots in the Law (New
Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 1999).
The sudden silence.
The urge for political integration: Constructing a stable national identity.
The problems of political integration: Disputed
identities.
The use of framing language in political speeches.
Analysis of the closing speeches.
Examples of suppressed concerns.
Read:
Note: Veterans Day Weekend
Feeney Bar Article on Florida Courts
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Peter Du Preez, The Politics of Identify: Ideology and the Human
Image (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980).
William E. Connolly, Identity \ Difference: Democratic Negotiations
of Political Paradox (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).
The nature of legitimacy and legitimation crises.
Legiltimation
through pseudo-science.
Standard techniques of suppressing controversy: Censorship (formal and informal); attacks on
motives; symbolic actions; half-hearted reforms; dispersal of responsibility.
Long-term consequences of suppressed communication: Alienation; urban disorder; anomie;
cynicism. How these effects benefit the
Republican Party.
Read:
Symbolic Actions
Report of Florida Governor’s Task
Force
Florida Election Reform Act of 2001 as
Senate markup and as printed in 2001 statutes
Washington Post on Florida Election Reform Act
Possible Cover Ups
Palm Beach County erases election files
Attempts to Create a Spectacle
Article on USCRC Meeting in Tallahassee
Harris rejects blame in testimony to USCRC
Bush rejects blame in testimony to USCRC
Testimony of Felon Disenfranchisement Firm
Lingering Issues
Times Union Article on One Florida 7/01
The 2002 Gubernatorial Election
Orlando Sentinel Poll of Jeb Bush Popularity 7/01
Fund-Raising by Jeb Bush for 2002
Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence: Public Opinion – Our
Social Skin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
Amy Fried, Muffled Echoes: Oliver North and the Politics of Public
Opinion (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Roger Cooter, The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and
the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by James
Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton, 1961).
Jurgen Habermas (1973, 1975). Legitimation Crisis. Translated
by Thomas McCarthy. Boston: Beacon Press.
Harold D. Lasswell, Psychopathology and Politics
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1930, 1977).
Strauss, Leo (1988). Persecution and the Art of
Writing. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. (Originally published 1952:
The Free Press).
November 20: Studies
of the Election
The
conservative role of science in politics
Critique of post-election research:
Misdirected to issue of who “really” won.
Failure to address issue of partisanship in election administration.
Read:
Government Reports
Draft Final Report of the U.S. Civil
Rights Commission
Final Report of United States Civil Rights Commission
U.S. House study of differential error
rates
Report of Florida Governor’s Task
Force
Congressional Action on TV
Announcements of Election Results
Media Studies
NY Times regarding
felons voting
Miami Herald report of its review of Dade ballots: Gore gets only 6 votes
Herald Report of review of Palm Beach County
voter errors
Herald Story of about an voter gone bizzerk
Herald Story on Previous Ballot Problems
Not All Counties conducted the legally required
recount
Problems occurred in Palm Beach County in 1996
Voting Irregularities in Broward County
Academic Studies
Carnegie Mellon University study of Butterfly Ballots
Cornell University study of Butterfly Ballot
University of California at Berkley study of Butterfly
Ballot
Noam Chomsky’s “Lessons from the Election”
Note: Upcoming Thanksgiving
Weekend
Judith Eleanor Innes, Knowledge and Public Policy:
The Search for Meaningful Indicators (New Brunswick: Transaction Books,
1994)
Aaron Wildavsky, Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and
Craft of Policy Analysis (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1987, 2000).
Suggested
Readings for Graduate Students
Peter Allan Dale, In Pursuit of a Scientific Culture: Science, Art,
and Society in the Victorian Age (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1989).
William Eaton, The Sociology of Mental Disorders (Westport:
Praeger, 2001).
Brian Fay, Critical Social Science ( Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1987).
Marx, Karl (1967). Capital: A Critique of
Political Economy. New York: International Publishers.
Marcu G. Raskin and Herbert J. Bernstein, New Ways of Knowing: The
Sciences, Society, and Reconstructive Knowledge (Totowa, New Jersey: Roman
& Littlefield, 1987).
Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage
Books, 1978).
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation,
written 1810-1814.
James P. Scanlan, Marxism in the USSR: A Critical Survey of Current
Soviet Thought (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985).
Carl Ipsen, Dictating Demography: The Problem of Population in
Fascist Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
November 27: Group
Project Presentations
Essays and Term Papers Due
December 4: Prognostications for Florida and
American
Politics
Read: Colburn and
deHaven-Smith, pp. 146-150.
December 10-15: Exam Week. See exam schedule for time and date.
The three paradigms considered in the course are:
(1) The social and political
philosophy of the American Founders. This paradigm
underlies our Constitutional system of federalism, separation of powers, and
individual rights. Our political system
rests on certain assumptions about human nature, political power, knowledge,
communication, social cohesion and conflict, etc. This paradigm provides most of the taken-for-granted ideas and
expectations in everyday American politics, but it is seldom recognized and
treated as a contestable worldview. For
example, because politics in America is treated as a competitive struggle between
conflicting regions and classes, elections are treated as unrepeatable
decisions, rather than as, say, indicators of a stable collective opinion or
judgment that might be reexamined if the “snapshot” is for some reason unclear. The founders paradigm includes at least
three axioms.
a)
Human
beings differ by nature in terms of their intelligence, initiative, and
virtue. Because of these differences,
all societies are divided into a few distinct classes. Under conditions of liberty and economic
opportunity, a small group will rise to the top and constitute a natural
aristocracy. A larger group with either
exceptional ability and moderate drive or exceptional drive and moderate
ability will rise to leadership positions in business and commerce. The remaining people, who together
constitute a sizable majority among the total population, will remain in
various social and economic positions that perform toil and minister to the
mundane needs of their superiors. Class
divisions of this sort are inevitable, and efforts to eliminate them result in
tyranny, as do efforts to prevent the circulation of people between classes
from one generation to the next.
b)
The
best social order is one that, in addition to allowing free circulation between
classes, maintains each class in its proper place. The natural aristocracy must be given the respect its members
deserve; the merchants, farmers, and other property owners must be allowed to
increase their wealth; and the toiling masses must be assured of their liberty,
safety, and dignity, while at the same time being prevented from expropriating
the property of others or shirking their responsibilities as citizens.
c)
For
purposes of maintain a healthy balance among the hierarchy of classes into
which people naturally divide, the best form of government is republic or what
is today called a representative democracy.
A republic gives each class a voice in making collectively binding
decisions. It maintains a dynamic
tension between the classes by arranging offices into a system in which each
one can act as a check on the others.
In the American republic, the lower classes control the House of
Representatives; the commercial classes control the executive; and the natural
aristocracy has the Senate and the Supreme Court. The House can check the actions of the other branches through its
control over the budget, which can initiated only by this body. The Senate can block the House by refusing
to cooperate with its legislation, and it can constrain the Presidency and the
Supreme Court through its power to reject Cabinet and Supreme Court
appointments and international treaties.
The president can block the legislative branch by vetoing legislation,
and it affects the Supreme Court through its power to appoint Supreme Court
justices. The Supreme Court is a check
on the executive and the legislative branches through its power to declare laws
unconstitutional. Also, the Chief
Justice is the presiding officer in any impeachment trial in the Senate.
d)
The
truth is accessible to all who would seek it.
All adults are capable of discerning their own interest, judging
competing arguments, and recognizing infringements on their natural
rights. Conditions that facilitate
individual and collective reasoning are the freedoms listed in the first ten
amendments to the Constitution.
(2)
The social and political paradigm implicit in contemporary, mainstream
social science in the United States. This
paradigm can be explicated by spreading out and connecting the separate
disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology to arrive at a
comprehensive blueprint of social order and change. The social scientific paradigm goes largely unrecognized because
it is concealed by the fragmentation of the social sciences into isolated
fields and sub-fields, each having its own journals, jargon, and
questions. But it can be made visible
by considering the presuppositions inherent in the overall constellation of
subject matters. For example, the
discipline of political science, simply by studying elections, assumes that
elections are a decisive factor in the political system rather than simply
being, say, “applause meters” that measure the amount of money spent on
campaign commercials. Similarly, the
discipline of economics focuses on markets, not on, say, the effects of
technology on social stratification, the concentration of capital, or the
coercive powers of managers and supervisors. The modern paradigm of the social
sciences disagrees with the early-modern paradigm of the American founders on a
number of important points, such as:
a)
The distribution of intelligence and initiative. The Founders believed that some people are naturally better than
others, and that these differences in ability will be accurately reflected by
wealth and status if inherited privileges are dismantled and people are left
free to pursue their own happiness.
Modern social science assumes that, while there may be genetic
differences between individuals, ability is randomly distributed across social
classes, races, ethnic groups, genders, generations, and all other social
fault-lines, and any differentials in ability across social groupings arise
from environmental factors, which may include self-perpetuating mental and
physical disabilities caused by low status, inadequate incomes, and the like.
b)
The origins and value of social and political conflict. The Founders took conflict to be natural and inevitable because
of inequalities (also thought to be natural and inevitable) in education,
wealth, and virtue. The system of checks
and balances was intended to process this conflict by giving the less capable
elements of society ultimate power to initiate political action (via control
over the budget), while granting to their intellectual superiors control over a
variety of vetoes-points (notably, the Senate). In contrast, the social sciences generally assume that social and
political conflict is an artifact of inherited inequalities in wealth and the
dysfunctional subcultures such inequalities produce. From the social scientific perspective, social cohesion is a
spontaneous outcome of open public discourse.
Hence, the social sciences seek to measure a singular “public opinion”
and trace divisions of public opinion to social and economic cleavages thought
to distort the reasoning processes of those individuals residing at the margins
(the very poor and the very rich).
c)
The best possible social order. These
differences between the Founders and modern social science lead to different
political ideals. For the Founders, the
most that can be hoped for is a social order where wealth and status are
allocated exclusively on the basis of initiative and ability, individual
liberty is protected, and the less capable majority cannot raid the wealth and
status of the more capable minority. In
contrast, social scientists implicitly envision a completely democratized
political process in a society without group-based differences in status and
wealth, where every person has life’s basic necessities; exchange or persuasion
rather than force governs most interpersonal relations; anger, disappointment,
sadness and stress have been minimized by exercise, psychotherapy, and
psychotropic medications; the duration of each human life is maximized by
medical interventions ranging from genetic engineering to artificial hearts;
and bigotry of all types has been dissolved by gentle child rearing, universal
education, and open public discussion.
(3) The emergent paradigm of
post-modernism. This paradigm is an
intellectual movement in the humanities that is now starting to transform the
social sciences. In its simplest form, post-modernism
is the idea that our modern view of the world is comparable to the
worldviews of preceding historical eras in being rooted in and serving a system
of power and production. Although we
recognize the spiritual value of myth and monotheistic religion, we have all
been taught to recognize that the pagan empires of antiquity and the Christian
empire of the middle ages had supersticious cultures that justified and
reinforced the ability of a small group of people in each system to command the
obedience of others and to have privileged access to the material and cultural
resources that were collectively produced.
In contrast, we in the modern era have not subjected our own worldview
to this same critique but have assumed instead that we moderns are using the
critical powers of science to strip away our illusions, not to create a new
cultural fabric in which to clothe the same old patterns of domination and
exploitation. However, this account of
modern culture has been under assault since the mid-1800s, beginning with
Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche, who were followed by Weber, Freud, and many
others. Post-modernism is an effort to
formulate a cultural perspective that somehow recognizes its own limitations
and the origins of these limitations in economic and political
inequalities. Because the paradigm is
in its formative stages, at this point its foundations and implications can
only be sketched. But several lines of
inquiry exposed by post-modernism are already well known:
a)
Learning processes. The idea
that societies are organized around learning process was proposed by Jurgen
Habermas, a German philosopher and social theorist who is still an active
scholar. Post-modernism analyzes science and other forms of
thought as extensions of the social order rather than as objective accounts of
self-evident subject matters. Certainly,
one of the weakness of the Christian Middle Ages was the restriction placed on
asking the kinds of questions we now associate with the natural sciences. Nevertheless, a great deal of collective
reasoning occurred at this time, especially about the character and purpose of
humankind. The epistemological bias
discerned in modernity by post-modernists is the view that science is the only
valid form of knowledge, when in fact it is only one form of knowledge among
many, namely, knowledge for manipulating or controlling nature-like
processes. We can think of many other
forms of knowledge—from cooking to ethics, art, and philosophy—that are based
on systematic inquiry, have recognized standards of validity, and are essential
ingredients to the advancement of humankind, and yet do not qualify as
“sciences.”. Post-modernism leads us to consider whether certain types of
learning processes are today being neglected or prohibited because of we have
mistakenly apotheosized natural science, relegated all other lines of inquiry
to the status of opinion, and transmogrified the most important questions about
human freedom, dignity, and spirit into technical questions that conceive of
human beings as mechanical objects to be manipulated, socialized, counseled,
treated, etc. With respect to the 2000
election, we might ask what kinds of questions have been posed about the
controversy, what has been learned, and also what has been overlooked.
b)
Technologies of the self. This phrase was introduced by Michel
Foucault, a French historian and sociologist who died a few years ago. He coined the term to capture the fact that
culture, knowledge, and societies in general are permeated with force in the
traditional sense of the term, that is, physical contact with a person’s body
to coerce desired behavior. We are well
aware of how force was used in prior epochs to achieve conformity and
obedience. We know about the tortures
associated with slavery, ancient and modern.
But we are inclined to think that the only force in the social order of
today is the power exercised by parents and the police. However, Foucault pointed out that every
society, including our own, is interpenetrated by technical machinery and
physical infrastructure that move us around physically, magnify or distort our
senses, and define us to ourselves.
Consider, as examples, school children seated in rows of chairs in a
classroom. Their bodies are forced by
the chairs to adopt a predetermined posture; the arrangement of the chairs
mitigates against expressions of individuality and demands uniformity; the separation
of the students into classes, grades, and schools forces some people together
and others apart. The application of
corporal punishment or other methods of discipline is merely the tip of the
whip in this overall system for organizing children’s bodies. Returning to the 2000 election, the idea of
technologies of the self directs our attention to the physical dimension of the
voting process, and to the implications for body and mind of voters from around
the nation going simultaneously to thousands of separate polling places in
thousands of geographically bounded precincts.
Like migratory animals acting on instinct in a complex process of
reproduction, we wait for the appointed day and then all find our way to the
place where our particular group knows to deposit its ballots, which are then
delivered like sperm to central locations, where they are combined and passed
finally to the womb of power, the state office that tallies the vote, and the
populace waits for the decision to be delivered like a newborn, who might be
either a boy or a girl regardless of what the sonogram-like readings have been
in the political polls. Such a
miraculous process! Imagine how
different it would seem to us if we voted electronically from our homes and
could change our minds up to a certain time as we watched the vote totals for
each candidate. Now we would see a
contest, rather than a mysterious, totally unique, and therefore nonreplicable
act of nature.
c)
Language. The modern
era rests on what Wittgenstein, a British-educated philosopher who lived in the
20th Century, referred to as the “naming theory” of language, the
idea that words stand for things or observable actions. We moderns attribute the superstitions of
preceding eras to the tendency of people to fabricate words for things that do
not exist (Apollo, fate, Hades, angels, witches, etc.), and we think of
ourselves as being able to shed these superstitions because of our willingness
to check our ideas by carefully looking for the things they are supposed to
describe. However, Wittgenstein showed us
that language is not devoted exclusively or even primarily to naming but rather
is a set of signals that have meaning only in relation to a physical and social
setting. Consider, for example, the
simple phrase, “Go home,” and the different meanings it would have if said to a
tired co-worker at the office versus a dinner guest at a friend’s home. In the first instance, it is an expression
of concern, whereas in the second it is an indication of anger, impatience, or
disappointment. Conversely, expressions
often imply or presuppose a certain social setting and configuration. Calling a grown woman a “girl” is not just a
mistake, it is an insult, because it implies that she lacks adult status. Thus, post-modernism directs our attention
to the potential for words to be carriers of the system of status and power,
and to at once both conceal this system and reinforce it. In the 2000 election controversy, we might
explore the ways in which language was used to shape and distort popular
perceptions. Examples would be such
phrases as Gore Loserman; rent-a-mob; activist court; Cruella Harris; running
out the clock, etc.
Lance deHaven-Smith,
Ph.D.
Professor of Public
Administration and Policy
Florida State
University
Note: The following table differentiates
between facts that were known at the time of the election controversy and
those that became public later. The
latter are in bold print, while the former are in normal print.
November 8: First
statewide vote totals reported to Florida Secretary of State are 2,909,135 for
Bush to 2,907,351, a margin 1,784. A
recount required by state law reduced the margin. Governor Jeb Bush recuses himself from participation on the Florida
Elections Commission, which must eventually certify the election results.
In the
morning hours, on instructions from his brother George W., Florida Governor Jeb
Bush, who was co-chair of the Bush presidential campaign in Florida, leaves
Texas and returns to Florida by private jet.
At 3:30
a.m., Frank Jimenez, General Counsel for the Governor of Florida, begins
gathering information for the Bush campaign by making the first of what will be
8 phone calls to the Florida Division of Elections over the course of the next
48 hours.
At 4:00 a.m., Ed Kast
from the Florida Division of Elections was being interviewed by CNN when
Jimenez has him pulled off the air for fear he might hurt the Bush cause. Jimenez then goes to office of the Division
of Elections to find Clay Roberts, the Division’s Director, who media describe
as a “Bush loyalist.”
At 6:15 a.m., state
employees in the Florida Governor’s legal office begin phoning Florida’s top
law firms to discourage them from working for Al Gore during the recount.
At 2:07 p.m., Don
Rubottom, a lawyer for the Florida House of Representatives, sends an e-mail
authorized by Florida House Speaker Tom Feeney (a Republican and Jeb Bush’s
running mate in the Florida gubernatorial election of 1994) through an intermediary
to Jeb Bush suggesting that the Florida Legislature intervene and select
Florida’s Electoral College electors for George W. Bush. Rubottom also sends
similar e-mails to Secretary Harris and her General Counsel.
Legal staff in Governor
Jeb Bush’s office, including the Governor’s General Counsel, Frank Jimenez,
look for ways to prevent a recount.
Florida Attorney
General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat and co-chair of the Gore campaign in
Florida, urges the Gore camp to hang tough and fight. Florida Attorney General Bob Butterworth, a Democrat, appears on
television to present the manual recounts in a favorable light. From this time forward, Butterworth keeps in
close contact with Gore campaign and legal team.
Governor Jeb Bush calls
Austin to discuss whether he should recuse himself.
Division
of Elections staff prepare a press release for Secretary of State Katherine
Harris that says overseas ballots be “postmarked or signed and dated” by
Election Day. It was never released.
November 9: Manual
recounts are requested by the Gore campaign in Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade,
and Volusia Counties.
Jimenez, the General
Counsel for Governor Jeb Bush, continues placing calls to the Florida Division
of Elections to gather information for the team of George W. Bush.
Florida Governor Jeb
Bush meets with the Bush legal and political team at the headquarters of the
Republican Party in Florida and advises against seeking or supporting any
manual recounts.
An unnamed Bush
campaign official contacts Mac Stipanovich, a well-known Republican campaign
strategist, and convinces him to join Harris’ staff as an advisor during the
controversy.
November 10: The Palm Beach County Canvassing Board begins an initial manual recount
of 1 percent of the ballots to determine if the overall machine count may be in
error. The Canvassing Board agrees in
advance to count a partially punched chad as a vote if light passes through the
ballot at the proper place. This was
referred to as the “sunshine rule.” Democrats ask instead for a more generous rule that would also
count as votes any chads that were merely indented.
The
Canvassing Board breaks for lunch and the Chair, Circuit Judge Charles Burton,
an appointee of Jeb Bush, meets privately with an attorney from the office of
Secretary of State Harris. When the
Canvassing Board reassembles, Burton changes the rule to require two of a
chad’s four corners to be detached for it to count as a vote.
November 11: Bush
campaign commences federal lawsuit in U.S. District Court to halt manual
recounts, asserting the recounts violate the equal protection clause of the 14th
Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
Private individuals initiate lawsuit in Circuit Court in Palm Beach
County to require a revote due to the confusion surrounding the county’s
butterfly ballot. At about 2 a.m., the
Palm Beach County Canvassing Board concludes its initial manual recount of 1
percent of the ballots and, over the objections of Burton, decides to proceed
with a full manual recount.
At 6:00
p.m., Jimenez, Jeb Bush’s General Counsel, calls Clay Roberts, the Director of
the Division of Elections, to see if the Secretary of State could legally issue
an advisory opinion saying that the full manual recount in Palm Beach County
was unlawful because the difference between the machine count and the manual
recount had not been due to a mechanical failure. Clay told Jimenez that the opinion would have to be requested by
a political party. Jimenez contacts Al
Cardenas, the Republican Party Chairman, to ask him to make the request, and
Cardenas faxes one to Roberts.
November 12: Palm Beach County begins manual recount. In the evening, an opinion is faxed from the Florida Division of
Elections to the Palm Bach County Canvassing Board saying that the manual
recount was not justified.
Foreseeing
the possibility that the Division of Elections might try to stop the recount in
Palm Beach County, staff in the Florida Attorney General’s Office contact an
intermediary with the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board and suggest that the
latter seek a legal opinion from the Attorney General on whether the recount is
lawful.
November 13: Counting
partly pushed chads only if at least two corners have been severed, Broward County
Canvassing Board conducts manual recount of 1 percent of ballots and votes
against a full recount after finding only a 4 vote gain for Gore, which, if
projected to 100 percent, would yield only a 400 vote gain for Gore, not enough
(at the time) to change the election outcome.
The Palm Beach County
Canvassing Board finds the fax from the Division of Elections in its fax
machine. Later that day the Board
receives a fax from the Florida Attorney General contradicting the opinion from
the Division of Elections.
U.S. District Court
rejects Bush request to stop recounts.
Volusia County sues in Florida Circuit Court to be allowed complete
manual recounts past the November 14 deadline in Florida election law. Gore and Palm Beach County Canvassing Board
are allowed to join the Volusia suit.
In her
first statement on the issue, Ms. Harris says overseas ballots have to be
“executed” on or before Election Day. They are not required “to be postmarked
on or prior to” Election Day. Democrats complain she was blurring the rules.
November 14: Florida Circuit Court rules that the Florida Secretary of State can
enforce the November 14 deadline for accepting returns, but cannot be arbitrary
in doing so. Canvassing Boards are told
in the ruling that they may submit amended returns at a later date, and Harris
can decide whether to accept them.
Broward and Palm Beach County Canvassing Boards return to manual
recounting. Harris faxes letter to the
counties instructing them to state their reasons, in writing, by 2 p.m.
November 15, for wanting to submit vote totals later than November 14.
After the Circuit Court
rules that late submissions are legal, the Miami-Dade Canvassing Board finally
meets to respond to Gore’s request on November 9 for a manual recount. The Board conducts a 1 percent recount, from
which Gore receives a net gain of 6 votes.
The Board votes 2 to 1 against a complete manual recount on the grounds
that Gore would not gain enough votes for the election outcome to be
altered.
November 15: Volusia Canvassing Board appeals Circuit Court Ruling to the Florida’s
First District Court of Appeals.
After receiving letters
from 4 counties by the 2 p.m. deadline, Florida Secretary of State says she
rejects the reasons given by counties for late filings, says she will not
consider any subsequent returns, and announces that the election returns
received on or before November 14 will be certified on November 18, the day
after the deadline for receiving overseas absentee ballots.
In the evening, Al Gore
appears on national television and proposes that a manual recount be conducted
statewide and that he and Bush meet.
Bush appears on television soon thereafter to reject both the meeting
and the statewide recount.
Mark
Herron, a Democratic consultant, writes a legal guide for Democratic lawyers to
challenge flawed ballots, including those cast by members of the military.
November 16: Gore
files suit in Florida Circuit Court seeking to compel the Secretary to accept
amended returns.
November 17: Deadline
for receiving oversees absentee ballots.
Florida Circuit Court
refuses Gore request to compel Harris to consider late returns. Gore appeals Circuit Court ruling to
Florida’s First District Court of Appeal.
: Florida Supreme
Court, on its own initiative, uses its “pass through jurisdiction” to take up
both the Volusia and the Gore appeals.
In its order taking jurisdiction, the Court says the manual recounting
can continue and prohibits the Secretary of State from certifying the election
returns on November 18 as planned.
The U.S. Court of Appeals
for the 11th Circuit refuses to grant Bush’s appeal to stop manual
recounts in Broward and Palm Beach County.
Despite
their gains, Republicans are incensed by Democratic challenges to military
ballots and begin attacking the Democrats as unpatriotic.
Amid intense lobbying by both campaigns, canvassing boards across Florida meet to weigh legality of the overseas ballots and count those that are accepted. Mr. Bush has a net gain of 630 votes.
November 19: After the Florida Supreme Court allows
the recounts in the other counties to continue, one of the Miami-Dade County
Canvassing Board members, Circuit Judge Myriam Lehr, changes her vote, and
Miami-Dade begins a manual recount.
Senator Joseph I. Lieberman appears on national television, saying members of the military should get the “benefit of the doubt.”
In Broward County, Gore
has gained only 79 votes over Bush from the manual recount after more than 40
percent of the precincts have been counted.
On advice from Andrew Meyers, an assistant county attorney, the Broward
Canvassing Board decides to change its recount standard to consider slightly
indented or “dimpled” chads as indications of voter intent, and to go back through
the ballots already reviewed.
Meyers,
the assistant attorney for Broward County, is not assigned to advise the
Canvassing Board but shows up unsolicited and suggests that the Canvassing
Board should change its standard to conform to a Texas statute, which accepts
“dimpled” chads in manual recounts.
Meyer’s wife was assisting the Gore legal team.
November 20: Oral argument before the Florida Supreme
Court over the Secretary of State’s decision to stop the recounts and certify
the election returns.
In response to the suit on
the butterfly ballot, Circuit Court in Palm Beach County rules that a revote
cannot be granted. This decision is
appealed.
Speaker of the Florida
House of Representatives advocates a special legislative session, claiming that
the State Legislature can name the electors itself.
Attorney General Robert A. Butterworth, a Democrat, urges canvassing boards to revisit the issue of military ballots.
In the morning,
Michael Carvin, a lawyer for George W. Bush, was told by Joseph Klock, an
attorney selected by Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris to represent
her office during the dispute, that the Florida Supreme Court Justices had
already decided the case and had drafted an opinion giving 5 more days for
manual recounts.
November 21: Florida Supreme Court rules that manual recounts can continue. Court sets a new deadline for submitting the
amended returns. The deadline is Sunday
November 25 at 5:00 p.m. if the Secretary of State’s Office is open, or
November 26 at 9:00 a.m. if the office is closed on the 25th. James Baker publicly criticizes the decision
and suggests that the Florida Legislature should step in. Gore praises the decision, proposes again a
meeting with Bush, and says he will not support any efforts by Democrats to
convince Bush electors to the Electoral College to switch their votes.
From this point on, the
Bush legal team, Jeb Bush, and Florida Republican Chairman Al Cardenas begin
planning with Florida House Speaker Feeney and Florida Senate President John
McKay the timing of the Legislature’s intervention.
November 22: Bush
appeals Florida Supreme Court ruling to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In response to a suit from
Gore, the Circuit Court in Palm Beach County rules that the Palm Beach County
Canvassing Board cannot automatically reject ballots with dimpled chads but
must seek to discern the voters’ intent per Florida election law.
The Miami-Dade Canvassing
Board meets at 8 a.m. because of concerns that its recount cannot be completed
by November 26. The Board decides to
limit the recount to undervotes only, but after a loud demonstration outside
the room used for the recount, the Board breaks at 10:30 a.m., reconvenes at 1:30
p.m., and votes unanimously to end the recount.
Bush campaign sues 14 canvassing boards to try to get them to reconsider rejected military ballots.
Gore
personally calls Alex Penelas, the Mayor of Miami-Dade County. Gore thinks Penelas agrees to issue a
statement calling for the recount to resume and providing all necessary
resources to meet the deadline, but Penelas does not issue a statement.
November 23: Miami-Dade
County stops its manual recount. Gore
asks the Florida Supreme Court to require Miami-Dade to complete the manual
recount, but the Court rejects the request.
November 24: U.S. Supreme Court agrees to hear Bush’s appeal of the Florida Supreme
Court decision allowing the recounts to proceed. The issue it agrees to consider is not whether the recounts
violated equal treatment requirements in the U.S. Constitution but whether the
Florida Court, in setting a new deadline for submitting amended returns, had
changed Florida election law after the election, in violation of Title III of the
U.S. Code.
Nov. 24-26: In what Democrats called the “Thanksgiving stuffing,”
canvassing boards reconvene and accept previously rejected ballots, giving Mr.
Bush a net gain of 109 votes.
November 26: At
12:34 p.m., the Palm Beach County Canvassing Board faxes letter to Florida
Secretary of State asking to be allowed to submit amended returns on Monday
November 27, which Florida Supreme Court’s order authorized if Secretary’s
Office were closed in November 26. Secretary
immediately denies request.
Florida Secretary of State
certifies the election returns, with 2,912,790 votes for Bush and 2,912,253
votes for Gore, giving Bush victory by 537 votes. At 8:41 p.m., Governor Jeb Bush signs the certificate designating
Florida’s electors to his brother George W.
At 7:06 p.m., the Palm
Beach County Canvassing Board faxes its amended return to the Secretary of
State; it adds 215 votes to Gore’s total.
To
prevent Gore’s legal team from being able to have an injunction served to block
the certification from being transmitted to Congress before the election was
contested in Circuit Court per Florida election law, Florida Governor Jeb Bush
gives the document to an obscure staff member to take home with her and mail
the next morning.
November 27: Gore
files an action in Florida Circuit Court to contest the election returns in
Palm Beach, Miami-Dade, and Nassau Counties.
November 28: Circuit Court Judge orders disputed ballots in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade
Counties brought to the Court in Tallahassee.
November 29: Gore
asks Florida Supreme Court to immediately begin recounts to complete the
recounting in Palm Beach and Miami-Dade Counties.
November 30: A committee of the Florida House recommends a special session.
December 1: Oral
arguments in U.S. Supreme Court on Bush appeal of the decision by the Florida
Supreme Court to allow the recounts to continue until November 25-26.
Florida Supreme Court
upholds the Circuit Court decision on the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach
County.
December 2-3: Circuit trial on Gore’s action to contest the
election.
December 4: Gore’s
election challenge is rejected by the Circuit Court Judge. U.S. Supreme Court vacates the decision of
the Florida Supreme Court to extend the deadline for manual recounts, and
returns the decision to the Florida Court for clarification.
December 6: Separate
trials begin in Martin and Seminole Counties over alleged illegalities
involving absentee ballots.
Republican leaders of
the Florida Legislature announce plans to call a special session to consider
having the Legislature pick the electors itself.
December 7: Florida Speaker of the House and
President of the Senate formally call a special legislative session to commence
on December 8.
The
intent of the special session was to overrule the Florida Supreme Court after
December 12 if this became necessary.
The session was announced and held prior to the 12th to put pressure on the Florida Supreme
Court and create a sense of impending Constitutional crisis, which would help
draw in the U.S. Supreme Court.
December 8: Florida
Supreme Court rules in favor of Gore’s appeal of the Circuit Court decision,
orders a statewide manual recount of all under-votes, and adds 383 votes to
Gore’s total, bringing Bush’s margin to 154 votes. In an effort to prevent the recount, Bush appeals to the Florida
Supreme Court, the U.S. Court of Appeals, and the U.S. Supreme Court.
Circuit Courts rule in the
Seminole and Martin County absentee ballot cases that irregularities and
illegalities occurred but that the absentee ballots cannot be thrown out. These decisions are appealed to the Florida
Supreme Court.
Florida Supreme Court
denies Bush appeal to stop the recount.
U.S. Court of Appeals also
rejects Bush appeal but reinstates Bush’s 537-vote lead as certified.
Almost immediately after
this decision is announced, the U.S. Supreme Court orders the recounting to
stop and agrees to hear Bush’s appeal.
The
Florida Supreme Court decision includes a descent by Justice Wells that
expresses intense concern that the U.S. Supreme Court has already shown (in its
earlier remand of the Florida Court’s first decision) that the high court will
overrule the Florida Court. Wells’ descent
also reveals his concerns about provoking the Florida Legislature.
December 11: U.S. Supreme Court hears oral
arguments.
Committees in the Florida
House and Senate pass a resolution for consideration by their full bodies to
appoint the electors pledged to Bush.
December 12: Florida Supreme Court upholds Circuit Court decisions not to throw out
absentee ballots in Martin and Seminole Counties.
At 10:00 p.m., U.S.
Supreme Court issues ruling that the Florida Supreme Court must set standards
for manual recounting, but the Court concludes that the time has run out to do
this.
December 13: Gore concedes.
