Advertisement - Click to support our sponsors.
Honolulu Lite
I demand a manual recount of Hawaii's November election. I do so because, now that I think about it, I'm not sure I perfectly filled in a couple of the little boxes (or were they circles or ellipses?) next to the names of the candidates I intended to vote for. My will be
done -- but
what was it?The problem is, I'm not the most coordinated guy in the world. And my eyesight isn't what it used to be. I forgot to take my reading glasses to the polls. In order to vote, we were supposed to color in the little box-like thingy with a pencil (or was it a pen?). But that takes a certain amount of artistic talent that I do not possess. When I was a kid putting crayons to coloring books, I could never stay inside the lines. It's in the records of Cloverdale Elementary School in Omigosh, Ga. Check it out.
We live in a country where -- as we have learned in recent weeks -- EVERY VOTE COUNTS! What is a vote? A vote is an electromagnetic impulse in the brain, a firing of certain neurons that expresses the desire or intent of each person.
That intent is the most important thing in the world of voting. It is more important than considering whether the person with that intent is hungover and not paying attention (not applicable in my case), is distracted by the short skirt of the lady who went into the next booth (ditto), or simply does not possess the hand-eye coordination to turn neural impulses into the mechanical action needed to physically express his mental intent (BINGO!).
If a voter screws up his ballot or even thinks he may have screwed up his ballot, it is the solemn obligation of the government to hand recount every ballot to determine what the intent of the nitwit was. And I demand such a review!
NOW, I know a hand recount is costly, not to mention dangerous. Hawaii did a hand count in a previous election and a lot of people got paper cuts and bruised fingertips shuffling through all those ballots. But what price do we put on democracy? The fact that the hand count pretty much confirmed the original tally is neither here nor there.
I'm sorry that I wasn't really paying attention when I voted. But that's not the point. I intended to vote and now it's up to all of you to make sure that my will was done. If a hand recount is not ordered, then I have LOST MY FRANCHISE to vote, and that is a threat to the very foundation of our system of government.
It doesn't matter that more than a million ballots are screwed up in national elections each year for reasons running from momentary insanity to intentional mischief. A recent analysis of American elections by the Scripts Howard News Service showed that 1.7 million ballots did not count in the presidential race four years ago. Imagine that. The express will and intent of 1.7 million red-blooded, patriotic citizens was thwarted.
It is alleged that many thousands of votes were thusly screwed up in Florida, which is why, in a fit of righteous indignation over the future of national elections, Vice President Al Gore's supporters demanded that all ballots be hand recounted in three of the most heavily Democratic Florida counties and that a raft-load of absentee ballots from Republican strongholds be used as kindling for a great big old "Gore is President" bonfire.
After the Hawaii hand recount I am demanding, I shall seek no such bonfire of ballots found to contain votes cast for candidates other than those I chose. A small shredding party, however, might be in order.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
The Honolulu Lite online archive is at:
https://archives.starbulletin.com/lite