A diminished democracy

AMERICA'S LEGENDARILY ROBUST democracy is undeniably weakened for the enormously contentious manner in which the U.S. Presidential election has been finally determined for all practical purposes. The Republican Party candidate, Mr. George W. Bush, is the nominal winner at the end of a complex judicial process dominated if not also defined by deep political passions. Inevitably, Mr. Al Gore, the U.S. Vice-President as also the Democratic nominee, must be preparing to acknowledge the fact of Mr. Bush's having emerged the winner. This will not of course be easy for a man who sees himself as the victim of an imprecise evaluation of the election in which he has demonstrably won the national tally of popular votes but not the mandatory majority in the Electoral College. Inexorable however is the political message inherent in the statutory time constraint. The Electoral College is scheduled to vote on December 18 under a unique and antiquated poll process that was designed to uphold the U.S.' founding principle of federalism. But the paucity of time is only one of the issues which have, on the whole, triggered serious doubts about the credibility of established institutions including the judiciary. The apex federal court has indicated that its centrality in the vortex of this political maelstrom is not of its own choosing. However, a tenacious recourse to the legal process by and on behalf of Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore has produced a sad spin-off. This simply is the political variant of the cyber-age phenomenon of `virtual reality' as distinct from the absolute certainty about the actual winner.

Handing down two separate but inter-related split verdicts, the U.S. Supreme Court has reversed the most recent majority ruling by Florida's highest judicial authority. The five-week-long saga of this poll dispute began in the political domain soon after the election on November 7 itself and wove a labyrinth of court cases. The Florida Supreme Court had, only a few days ago, favoured a manual counting of thousands of Presidential poll ballots which were earlier invalidated in the `objective' machine-reading of the voters' preferences. The burden of the U.S. Supreme Court's judgment is that any such hand-counting of `disputed ballots' can be ordered only within the constitutional purview of ``equal protection'' for all voters and a ``due process'' besides a uniformity of counting standards for Florida in its entirety. This leaves the highest adjudicating authority in that State with no adequate time to reconsider the case that has now been referred back to it. With Florida having quickly emerged as the decisive state for both Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore in the stakes for a majority in the Electoral College, the U.S. Presidency may have in the end been decided by political and legal filibustering.

The immediate imperative is not so much a re-invention of the presidential poll process as a damage-control exercise designed to ease the impact of the present crisis of ensuring Presidential legitimacy on the U.S. institutions and on its authority abroad. The latest turn of events may save the U.S. from a constitutional crisis per se. Behind the intricate goings-on, though, is the nagging feeling that the judges in Florida and at the federal apogee have not been able to rise above their own political- ideological moorings to address the simple but profound issue of a full and fair vote count. The public discourse in the U.S. is laced with notions that Florida's ``Democratic-leaning'' apex court favoured Mr. Gore while the U.S. Supreme Court, consisting of a majority of Republican-nominated judges, was kind to Mr. Bush. Similar perceptions about the vote-counting officials, too, have taken hold. In a surcharged political ambience, Florida's Republican-dominated House has also passed a resolution assigning its own slate of Electors to favour Mr. Bush. Will the Electoral College now become a battle ground for a `conscience vote'?

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