Volume 48, Number 3 · February 22, 2001
The Road to Illegitimacy
By Mark Danner
After you have spent some days searching for the secret of political legitimacy in Miami and West Palm Beach, you want to go further. You have witnessed the ritual on the nineteenth floor of the gleaming granite Stephen P. Clark Building in downtown Miami, where, two months after the voters spoke and a month after the Supreme Court handed down its judgment, a journalist from The Miami Herald and a man from the BDO Seidman accounting firm sit hunched over a long table, squinting for five hours each day at the perforated punch-card ballots that were intended, on November 7, to express 'the will of the people.' You have plumbed the intricacies of the hushed ceremony in West Palm Beach's pale adobe Governmental Center, where three journalists, two accountants, three Republican Party volunteers, a lawyer, and assorted hangers-on lean forward in unison to behold and record the mysteries of these punctured cardboard artifacts that were meant to confer legitimacy on our country's leader.
Feature, 6492 words
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