THE GRAY LINE TOUR

Published 12:00 am Friday, November 10, 2000

Leonard Gray / L’Observateur / November 10, 2000

All right, I don’t want anyone from now on to complain that “their one vote doesn’t count.” That’s nonsense and hopefully, the experience in thisyear’s presidential election shows that quite plainly.

Every vote counts. Right now, you can hear the same words from George W.Bush and Al Gore, who are right now scrabbling for every single vote they can scrounge in Florida, and they may be going back to Iowa and Wisconsin as well, if recounts there are ordered.

Voting is a hard-won privilege given to all adult citizens of the United States and so many people take it for granted, that some citizens don’t bother to register and some of those registered don’t bother to vote.

This year’s election is likely the tightest on record. At press time, Bush’slead in Florida was at 229 votes, with thousands more still to count.

Without question, Florida voters must feel somewhat important, in that their votes will likely decide our next president.

It isn’t the first time presidential elections came to a hair. One can lookback to the 1888 race between Benjamin Harrison (himself the grandson of William Henry Harrison) and Grover Cleveland. In that election,Democrat Cleveland was the victim of charges he beat his wife, and Republican Harrison was dubbed “the human iceberg” for his aloof nature.

But it came to where Harrison won the popular vote and Cleveland won the electoral votes and the White House.

This year’s election also showed the influence of third-party candidates, again mirroring the past which featured such dark-horse candidates as Theodore Roosevelt, a former president who bolted his party to run on a “Bull Moose” ticket; George Wallace, who barnstormed during the 1968 race; and Ross Perot, who had influence with his Reform Party in the 1992 and 1996 races.

This year, it was Ralph Nader and the Green Party who helped muck up the Florida returns, while the Reform Party is facing oblivion.

Voting is important, and voters had a banquet of candidates to pick from for president. Locally, eight candidates were on the ballot, including long-shots from the Constitution, Libertarian, Natural Law, Socialist Workers, Green and Reform parties.

Here, as elsewhere, only the Green and Reform party candidates showed up on the popular vote radar as having any influence on the major campaigns.

It does illustrate, though, that the national electorate may be stirring for either a realignment of the “big two” political parties or further splinter-parties forming in the future to accommodate the special- interest groups.

Either way, interest in elections is at an all-time high and one can only hope that will be maintained.

In some countries, people continue to fight and die for the recognition we as Americans have as voting citizens. Yet, we sometimes duck ourobligations and complain that “my vote doesn’t mean anything.”Wrong, wrong, wrong. Every vote counts. Now, we know it.

LEONARD GRAY is a reporter for L’Observateur.

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