Saturday 18th November 2000
Nuffin the Hamster reports on even more
developments to you-know-what
FLORIDA (Sunday) - When I look out from the bars of my
cage, I know that the two vertical and horizontal wires represent what we in the
trade call a 'hole'. People may not attribute us hamsters with too much
intelligence when they watch us run on our wheels for hours on end but, when it
comes down to it, we know both what's good to eat and drink, where the best
place to build a nest is and...er...what a hole is.
Unlike Florida, I hasten to add.
Had a hamster been put in charge of the electoral
process this last week, there would have been a result a few hours after the
final voting centre had closed - if not before - but now it seems unlikely that
we'll get a firm declaration before Christmas (and I'm not going to commit
myself to naming the Christmas of any particular year, either).
As the limited hand counts ended Saturday
night/early Sunday morning, news reached me in my nest that a declaration had
gone out for the entire county to be recounted manually come 10am Monday morning
- just one hour after the Bush lawsuit was due to be heard in the courts in an
attempt to forbid such a count. Someone said that there might be a manual count
started Sunday to pre-empt the lawsuit - but does that mean that Bush's law suit
might be filed this morning?
It's all getting very complex for even the brightest of
hamsters - and I must rate amongst the top thousand in the country. I always
thought that a vote was taken for the good of the country, to provide a
leadership which was a fair representation of the state of the nation. The
problem is, what's going on at the moment makes comments about the US that I'd
rather not put into words.
But let me get back to my original point before I
get sidetracked into another diatribe - hamsters know what holes are, need
no-one to tell them what the definition of one is so they can adequately
identify one and certainly need nothing written in the legislature to define
their existence...or non-existence - after all, a hole is nothing.
But, no - not in Florida. A hole is a missing chad
- or a broken one.
What's a chad? A chad is one of four very small
pieces of paper which holds the circle, square or triangle of paper in the hole
on the ballot paper. By punching out the hole next to your particular candidate
(or by Pat Buchanan if you don't understand the way to vote - is it any wonder
that this candidate didn't want the vote of people who couldn't even understand
how to register their choice?), you destroy all four chads - so the theory goes
- and a hole is created in the ballot paper which is then 'read' by the machine
counters.
Except that it doesn't happen like this. In a perfect world
it would have done - and a recount would be the same as picking up those little
circles of paper and counting them, for you should get one circle on the floor
of the booth for every one paper. Or two as in the case of 20,000 Palm Beach
County electors.
But this is too simple - and we don't live in a
perfect world. Sometimes a hole can be made when only two chads are broken and
the hole gets pushed behind the paper. And sometimes - as has been the case
discovered overnight - that only one chad has been broken, the circle of paper
remained in place and the machine has registered a 'non vote'.
As I noted in my previous article about the law
suits being brought, this all hinges on the unintelligence of the voter - they
didn't have the capacity to realise that they had to make a hole, to remove a
circle of paper, to pierce through their card until their poker reached the
other side. Amazing, isn't it? Al Gore wants to be elected by the dumb
masses.
Forget the intelligent vote - they've been cast
and Bush came out as winner. Gore could be elected to office on the growing tide
of the simpleton. And just what does that say about him? What comment does that
force one to make about the foundation of the future presidency?
Already I envisage a day when the
masses of people will see the true leader amongst us and will start to cry
'Diddley Squat! Diddley Squat!' in the offices of power, on the streets of the
cities and in the houses of our towns. Already I feel a new day dawn as the
growing discontent with the major presidential candidates will compel voters to
seek the alternative - a hamster president.
Oh, and by the way. Don't forget that the ballot
papers that had names written on such as Diddley's haven't yet been counted.
There're enough people left when the total number of balloting papers have been
taken from the total population of the US to mean that DS could sweep to a
landslide victory. Forget about the 20,000 overseas votes - what hasn't
been counted could run into millions.
Nuffin the Hamster writes
for the Rodent Weekly.
This article appears courtesy of that paper.
