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History Written By Those Who Hold The Chad

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By STEVE OTTO

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 14, 2008

History, as it is documented these days, will return to HBO on May 25 with what is labeled a docudrama surrounding a ballot count in the state of Florida and will be called "Recount."

It is a story some of us would just as soon forget about the 2000 presidential election in Florida and those loony days when the world looked on in amazement at how we conduct our elections in this part of the country.

On my desk I have a sealed plastic bag filled with tiny paper bits labeled with a "Certificate of Authenticity." It reads, "This certificate guarantees to the original owner the authenticity of the enclosed voter chad from Hillsborough County, Florida; a county that used the infamous 'butterfly ballots' in the 2000 election for President of the United States. These chad, which may be pregnant or may have been hung, were gathered after the election." It's signed by someone that, for some reason, I can't quite make out, but the card says he or she is "Registered Hillsborough Board of Elections."

The one thing I seem to recall most vividly from those remarkable days was no matter what the political persuasion was of the person I was talking to, he or she was convinced the other side was doing its best to steal the election. I'm not sure any of that has changed.

Katherine The Grate

It has only been eight years since the glory days of Katherine Harris and those weird guys staring intently at each ballot as if they could actually determine what the voter was thinking.

Winston Churchill, who said lots of things, said (more or less), "It is not enough to collect and establish facts. It is not enough to have them checked, corrected and commented upon by experts. What is ... of supreme importance is how you present them."

I don't know what history is going to have to say a hundred years or a thousand years from now about those days. Maybe nothing. Maybe it will have been lost and forgotten, unless someone digs up an old DVD of the "Recount" show and figures this is some kind of historical document.

We went over to our friends' house the other night. Their daughter was just back from a couple of weeks in Dallas that included a trip to the assassination museum in the old Texas School Book Depository building. She said that before she had gone, about all she knew was what she had seen in the Oliver Stone movie "JFK." If you missed that one, Stone pretty much implicates the military, the vice president and plenty of others in an assassination conspiracy to kill President Kennedy

Actually, I was surprised that was all she knew. Her dad is something of a conspiracy buff himself. He also believes we have been infiltrated by aliens from another planet. He almost had me when he pointed out that if you watch the Hillsborough County commissioners during their meetings none of them blink. It is a sign they are not from around here.

Will There Be "Florida II"?

I'm not so sure I'm going to watch the HBO show. The real thing was wacky enough. But you do wonder whether eight years from now they will have a sequel, this time based on the 2008 elections in Florida where the Democratic voters find themselves shut completely out of the selection process. Maybe they will call it "No A Count."

Keyword, Otto Graphs, to read and comment on Steve Otto's blog.

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