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At the Epicenter

Dr. Stepan N. Stool PH&D (11/9/00) 

The election results in Palm Beach County, Florida are beginning to look like an 8.0 on the Richter scale of American politics, and the tremors are about to hit Wall Street.

The needle on my seismograph began to move on Tuesday when I stood in the voting booth here in Palm Beach County, and looked at the structure of the Presidential ballot. I thought, and felt, "This could be trouble." The ballot had two sides, with the punch holes lined up alternately to names on the left and right sides of the punch list. Al Gore was listed second on the left side, after GW, but Gore's punch hole was third, after Buchanan, whose name was on the right side. To make matters worse, the names did not line up directly with the punch holes.

Nineteen thousand votes have now been thrown out, because voters punched two holes for president. That's 3% of the vote, where the typical number disqualified is .05%. In addition, 3,000 votes went for Buchanan, more than five times the number he got in counties as large or larger than Palm Beach. 

The argument about whether voters should, or should not, have been confused by the ballot, misses the point. Call them stupid, call them old, or blind, call them over-medicated, call them what you want, but 3% of the voters WERE confused. They tried to exercise their right to vote. And that right was denied them. And that is a bad thing.

Now, no matter what happens, at least half the electorate will feel that America does not have a legitimately elected government. 

The full magnitude of this quake, and its aftershocks, are yet to be felt. The rhetoric, and the acrimony, are only beginning, and barring a miracle, the next four years could be a very nasty, ugly time.

Technical indicators have been warning for months and months that things were about to get very bad.

The ground is beginning to shake, and this market built on flimsy stilts is about to come crashing down.