A consortium composed of USA Today and the Miami Herald has announced that Al Gore would have picked up only 49 additional votes in Miami-Dade County. Another study of all Floridian ballots conducted by The New York Times and CNN is being prepared as I write this. Yet no matter what the media concludes, there will be debates over the results. Is George W. Bush, the talking heads will ask, the legitimate 43rd President of the United States? And I have an answer.
It doesn't matter.
I know who won the 2000 Presidential election. Or rather, I know how you and I can find out for sure.
The major news organizations have it all wrong. They, like Visiting Professor Al Gore, believe the election's outcome can be determined rationally by the counting of all ballots. Yet it can't. While no one seems able to agree as to who the legitimate President is, almost everyone agrees that the result in Florida was a statistical tie. And the problem with a statistical tie is that no matter how many times one counts, inevitably one will reach varying conclusions.
As one of my professors demonstrated during the initial election brouhaha, you can try it yourself. Obtain two stacks of Xerox paper, both with one thousand sheets. Then add one single sheet of paper to one of your two stacks. Next, give both stacks to a friend with a lot of time on his hands, and ask that he count and tell you which stack has more paper. Not only will your friend be unable to determine which stack has the extra sheet, but your friend, no matter how intelligent he may be, will also be unable to count exactly one thousand sheets. To have even more fun, give your friend a time limit. Then see what conclusion he reaches. Chances are, you'll be presented with one stack that holds 870 sheets, and another that contains 1,012.
Maybe your friend will ask one of his friends for help. Perhaps that duo, in a fit of intellectual zeal, will recruit another and become a trio. Soon the small battalion of counters will be arguing over whether to count tattered sheets of Xerox paper while they threaten to call their lawyers.
So, as you can see, the election in Florida was a statistical tie. No one, I argue, will ever know the true winner by counting the votes in Florida, no matter how many times they count. Frustrating, I know.
But I have a solution. I have access to a form of knowledge that--while considered spurious in many intellectual circles--nonetheless will be able to prove who won the Presidential election.
How, you ask?
The year is 1811. The Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh has just lost the battle of Tippecanoe. In a fit of righteousness, he sends envoys to his conqueror, the American General and Presidential aspirant William Henry Harrison. "Harrison will not win this year to be the Great Chief," the messengers tell the Americans. "But he may win next year. If he does … He will die in his office. And after him, every Great Chief chosen every 20 years thereafter will die. And when each one dies, let everyone remember the death of our people."
Sure enough, Harrison was the first President to die in office. And every twenty years after him, the President elected in a "zero" year met an untimely end as well. You know the names: Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, Harding, Roosevelt, Kennedy. The curse of Tecumseh never fails. Though Ronald Reagan survived John Hinckley's attempt on his life, he was nevertheless hospitalized for several weeks. It remains to be seen whether the Gipper broke the Curse of the Prophet. Yet I somehow think he didn't. Not even supply-side economics, a voice tells me, can erase the memory of a dispossessed people.
Thus the solution presents itself. We simply sit around and wait for the Curse of the Prophet to rear its ugly head. Whoever dies within the next four years, either Gore or Bush, is necessarily the man who won the election. I don't think Tecumseh's ghost would be interested in the political machinations of the Rehnquist court. No, if Al Gore truly won the election, I believe that the Prophet would see to it that justice is done. If Bush goes, the country can rightly conclude that he was the legitimate President. And if Ralph Nader meets an untimely end somehow, well, then we're really in trouble.
For now, though, you and I can sit back and relax. Pay no attention to the talking heads. We know that the Curse of the Prophet will soon return, that the true President will reveal himself, and that the country will be once again forced to remember the death of Tecumseh's people.