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?

To back up his effort to crown himself over the heads of Florida’s voters, Bush is playing one of the hoariest cards in the right-wing deck: resentment of the judiciary. When Bush, in his “I’m in charge here” speech, denounced the Florida Supreme Court for “rewriting the law,” he knowingly stirred regional and racist resentment. His lawyers, led by Ken Starr crony Ted Olson, continued on the same tack with the US Supreme Court, in their brief charging the Florida high court with “judicial legislation” for extending the state’s certification deadline in a routine bit of legal interpretation. As political strategy, this effort to delegitimize the judiciary harks back to the impeach earl warren bumper stickers of 1960s segregationists and the Reagan-era attacks on civil-libertarian state judges like California’s Rose Bird. As legal theory, Bush’s Supreme Court argument has even more profound implications than the election itself. As Laurence Tribe and Gore’s legal team correctly noted in their reply, Bush “would undermine the authority of the judiciary to decide the meaning of law.”

An election is supposed to represent the direct line connecting people to power. The Bush strategy of impeding the vote counting does the opposite, drawing into the whirlwind every branch and level of government; each new escalation pulls the election’s outcome a step further from the voters. The conventional wisdom of the moment is that Gore should give up for the sake of closure, and the Democrats should return to fight another day. But the legitimacy of votes and the legitimacy of the judiciary in protecting voters’ rights are principles too fundamental to abandon without the most exhaustive political and legal battle. Whatever you think of Al Gore, this is terrain that is essential to fight for to the bitter end. Settling for less is a false closure not worth contemplating.