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After the Fact: The Election Sane

By Mark Grueter

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Well, after another bitter and divisive campaign, the President has been re-elected. 220 million citizens or 85 percent of adult-age Americans voted, which is the highest level of public participation we’ve ever seen in an election. The record number is particularly remarkable given the existence of our controversial National Civics Test for Voter Participation, an examination first instituted four years ago to ensure citizens are at least minimally educated on the issues.

The test, as we all know, was a rude awakening for many Americans when first implemented. However, since twenty million more people voted this year as compared to the last election, we can assume that Americans have been studying up on the issues. Obstacles to voting are nothing new in this country, and the Civics Test has not proved to be the barrier many thought it would be, especially compared to how it used to be.

It now seems difficult to believe, but it wasn’t so long ago that Americans had to actually wait in line to vote. Covering the election for this journal in the year 2004, I watched Floridians, primarily in low-income communities, wait for up to four hours just to cast their paper or electronic ballots. The dedication of people who apparently had nothing better to do with their time impressed me.

Why did the process often take so long? Evidently our officials did not hire enough workers to “man” the polling stations - where voters coalesced to register their selections. This is not to say that every American had to wait for an undue amount of time. In many places, it was possible to get in and out quickly. But in most stations, there were annoying wait times of varying lengths.

Nationwide, online voting did not take effect until 2012. Before that, Americans had to trek down to their local town hall or school gymnasium in order to partake in the democratic process. The general election was held on Tuesday, November 2nd, but for one reason or another, it was not made into a holiday and so many Americans couldn’t vote - it was difficult to get the needed time off from work. Voter “turnout” rates, at their highest, only reached around 40 percent of adult-age Americans.

In the 2000 election, Al Gore won the popular vote over George W. Bush but Gore was not elected president. Back then, presidents were elected by an institution called The Electoral College. Bush obtained more votes in this “college” than Gore and so Bush became President. The election was so close that lawyers and pundits for the losing side complained that many of the paper ballots were too confusing for some voters to comprehend, thus corrupting the process. These “confusing” ballots served as the only thing resembling our present-day minimum intelligence test, which separates the capable from the incapable.

Also back then, there were only two viable political parties, the Republicans and the Democrats. Existing laws made it nearly impossible for third parties and alternative, highly respectable voices to emerge. For example, in 2004, despite all his public service (along with my influential endorsement) independent candidate and consumer advocate Ralph Nader received only 1 percent of the national vote. The two parties excluded Nader from public debates, and he wasn’t able to raise enough money to run a competitive campaign because he had no corporate donors.

Before public financing of campaigns was instituted in 2016, political candidates were forced to solicit money from wealthy patrons in order to fuel their efforts. This fact excluded, for the greater most part, candidates critical of powerful and moneyed interests from our political process. Furthermore, the conventional wisdom of the time believed that candidates must run “centrist” campaigns in order to win elections.

Today, with a multi-party system and proportional representation, these electoral methods seem antiquated and unjust. But in those times, serious commentators and experts of every stripe believed – wholeheartedly - that America was a true democracy and that our system was fair. We must always keep this in mind.

Grueter's column on the presidential election ran for over a year.
Click here to see his previous column.

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Mark Grueter is a writer living in New York City. He can be contacted at grueter@methree.net.

© 2004 Me Three