The election gods will have their little jokes won’t they? Last month we noticed the irony of brainy Al Gore’s desperate appeal on behalf of a putative army of disenfranchised Morons for Gore in Palm Beach County, Florida, for a second chance to register their supposed preference for him, the instructions on the original ballot having proven too difficult for them to understand. Since then we have seen another bit of cosmic humor in the fact that, in the great “dimpled chad” battle, the Bush forces’ appeal to law and precedent in arguing that such doubtful votes should not be counted was slightly marred by the fact that the one and only state in which such votes are counted is Texas—and that Governor George W. Bush himself was the man whose signature made it lawful to count them.

But the best joke of all has been in the juxtaposition of the two parties’ arguments in every other court case in the seemingly unending struggle for the White House and in that which they adopted in the suits by Democratic voters against election officials in Seminole and Martin counties for allowing Republican Party representatives to fill in voter identification numbers on applications for absentee ballots. Not only in court but also in a fevered round of television appearances, Gore had passionately insisted that “every vote must count”—even when it was far from clear that there were in fact any uncounted votes—in the heavily Democratic counties of Dade, Broward, and