Legitimacy and Reason in the Florida Election Controversy

Abstract

The US election controversy of 2000 reaffirms a central finding of science studies: numbers vote totals, for example are complex beasts. This could not have been news to any American who has followed current events for the last few decades, given that controversies over the mechanics of voting were central to the civil rights movement. Precisely because the resistance to desegregation conceived itself as a morally legitimate guerrilla war, these controversies often turned on fine details of the voting process that were deformed, or allegedly so, under pretexts that appealed to categories of administrative and political reason. Laws to prevent voter suppression are not self-enforcing, any more than the Reconstruction amendments were self-enforcing in the wake of the contested election of 1876. Understandably, then, the legal instruments that have papered over the controversies about voting, from the 14th Amendment to the Voting Rights Act to the Supreme Court cases on electoral redistricting, also paper over the most basic fissures in the country's history. Historically, the great majority of white citizens have experienced the civil rights controversies as matters affecting someone else often nearby geographically, but effectively in a different world. But with the 2000 election controversy in Florida, the problematic details of voting attained nearly universal consciousness as something that affects basic institutional legitimacy, and thus the material interests economic stability, for example