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Practical politics
Far from Fixed
- What’s required to kickstart U.S. election reform? Evidently something more than 2000’s near-constitutional crisis.
Excerpt: It was supposed to be a market worth up to $4 billion.
In the months immediately following Election 2000, a broad range of political and civil rights leaders, editorialists and pundits seemed to agree on the absolute and immediate necessity of voting reform.
The shorthand for referring to this need was “Florida”—for the state that required more than a month (not to mention strong guidance from the U.S. Supreme Court) to decide that George W. Bush was indeed the choice of its voters and thus had won enough electoral college votes to become president. Before Florida, relatively few U.S. voters had appreciated the vagaries of holding nationwide elections under the individual auspices of the nation’s 3,156 counties.
But where many ordinary Americans saw Florida’s 36 days in the spotlight as a revelation, even a rebuke to U.S. democracy, others sensed a business opportunity. . . . .
About the writer: Andrea Kannapell is an editor for the Week in Review section of The New York Times.
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