Vote

With the last week of the campaign 2000 mercifully upon us it now appears that the most interesting facet of this year's presidential elections will be the vote-counting on November 7.

Call it apathy on the part of the voters or lack of star quality on the part of the candidates, this year's race for national leadership seems to have left a lot of people cold about the process.

Even party functionaries are having trouble beating drums locally. "I really can't see either one of them as president," one local party committee member confided Monday.

In naming its editorial choice last week, the regional daily damned both candidates with faint praise and called the campaign in general a disappointment. Colin Powell didn't run, Bill Bradley turned out to be a lot more exciting on the basketball court and John McCain dropped out.

Fairly good times are another problem for politicians.

No one has a war to be for or against or an economic disaster to blame on his opponent. Peace and prosperity are hard to run against and the apparent lack of substantive issues between the major party candidates has contributed to the pollsters finding that the race has retained a large number of undecided voters late into the process.

The potential problem from that finding is that many of those undecided may never make up their minds and just pass on the whole thing. In record numbers, voters did just that in 1996, when for the first time less than half of all Americans eligible by age to vote did, in fact, vote.

While President Clinton won less than half of the popular vote in that election, he won narrow pluralities victories in many states. Since winning individual states is key in the electoral college system that legally determines the winner, Clinton wound up with a landslide victory as third-party candidate Ross Perot was judged to have hurt Bob Dole more than the President.

Critics have long charged that the electoral college is obsolete and that a fair reflection of the popular vote would have been a runoff election between Clinton and Dole. However, fair is probably not the operative word in this process.

Defenders of the college say there is no guarantee that only two parties will maintain the political initiative and a means to settle splintered elections must be retained.

That leads us to another possible critical situation that could arise in a tightly contested election hanging on victory in the electoral college. We have another three-way race this year and, should no candidate win a majority in the electoral college, the whole business gets thrown into the House of Representatives to decide. That has happened twice in our history during the early 19th century and its specter has led political bosses around the country to bizarre election-night moves when the outcome of state votes remains in question late into the process.

Although the outcome was upheld, critics charged that former Chicago Mayor Richard Daley brought many of the city's dead back to life to vote Democratic in the 1960 election, when Illinois won the presidency for John F. Kennedy.

So the reality of it is, despite the quality of choices involved, if you don't get out to make those choices, the likelihood grows that someone else, legally or otherwise, will make them for you. That's not what our system is about.

If the presidential slate doesn't move you, remember that your neighbor is also counting on your vote. This year's ballot carries other candidates in statewide elections and congressional elections as well and many will carry off-year local elections.

In the end it really doesn't matter what moves you to vote, so long as you get to the polls on November 7. If you must be negative about it to get interested, go out and vote against someone.

The bottom line here is that voting is a privilege, but it's also an obligation we all should deal with, because we will all have to deal with the outcome. You may not like the menu, but we all have to eat, and you will get the check in any event.

David Hulse, News Editor