Here's the Bush idea of electoral reform: Cancel the election. The Florida legislature's move to choose the state's electors and declare George W. Bush the next President is only the latest of Bush's attempts to short-circuit electoral due process, raising the stakes in the Florida recount far beyond the interests and limitations of Al Gore. Bush's premature declaration of victory, the bare-knuckle tactics employed by his camp through the initial recount and now the legislature's attempt to pre-empt voters altogether have laid down a chilling marker: Bush is trying unilaterally to make his presidency a fact, rendering irrelevant both the legal system and a credible counting of Florida's votes.

To keep those voters' legally cast ballots from being counted, Bush, James Baker and Dick Cheney orchestrated a Big Lie campaign at an extraordinary level. New York Governor George Pataki insisted, "We've now had a count, a recount, a recount of the recount." In fact, at least 10,000 Miami-Dade ballots recorded no presidential vote, suggesting they were never counted properly in the first place. According to the New York Times, antiquated and error-prone Votomatic machines prevalent in the same county's black precincts may have cost Gore as many as 7,000 votes. Bob Dole hammered away at Gore for "disenfranchising" the military. The substance of those allegations vanished so quickly that the Bush campaign withdrew its lawsuit. Bush himself denounced Florida's hand counts, saying they were able to produce "no fair or accurate result." In fact, as US District Judge Donald Middlebrooks pointedly noted in rejecting Bush's case, Florida's hand-recount procedures are studiously "neutral," and Bush had as much right to request hand counts or to challenge certification as Gore. Hand recounts are routine in virtually every election jurisdiction in the country.

Curiously, the Republicans and Democrats seem to share the same central premise, which is that if enough votes get counted Gore will win--hence a GOP strategy based on impeding recounts at any cost. This strategy found near-perfect expression in that pre-Thanksgiving hecklers' veto of the Miami-Dade recount by a screaming crowd of Republican Congressional staffers flown in for the occasion. With thousands of Miami-Dade and Palm Beach votes still to be counted in Gore's post-certification contests, the legislature is now going to the next logical step: Why have an election at all when you can have a coronation?

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