WAS OUT OF the country on election day. And, although my absentee ballot arrived in a foreign land 10,000 miles away, I carried the ballot home with me because I feared the local post office would not send my vote home in time. But I had not concentrated on the fact that my absentee ballot had to have a foreign post mark by a certain date. As a result I was told my ballot would not be counted.
Shouldn't I be crying foul? Shouldn't I take the matter to court? Weren't the instructions too confusing for me to understand? Wasn't I given too little help when I requested an absentee ballot? Shouldn't the fact that I had intended to vote override the fact that my vote was improperly cast, as the Gore campaign would argue? Or should I try to borrow from the Bush campaign and plead that my improperly postmarked ballot should be counted anyway because I once served in the armed forces of the United States?
The answer to all of the above, of course, is no. And so should be the answer to all the rest of the excuses and arguments that claim that the rules should be ignored, deadlines stretched, invalid ballots counted, and the intent of voters divined. The exercise of trying to count dimpled chads is as futile as examining the entrails of chickens to decide an election.
The Gore camp does not want all the votes recounted - only those that might bring Gore a victory. The Bush camp does not want all improperly cast ballots to be thrown out - only those in Democratic strongholds.
The election of 2000 has fallen victim to the most ubiquitous of American vices - the lawsuit. Let this never happen again.
There is a growing consensus that the way we count our votes in this country has to change. There is enough time between now and the next presidential election to arrive at a uniform ballot for all American citizens in all the United States as is done in Canada. Canadian voters all face the same type of ballot when they walk into polling booths from the Atlantic to the Pacific, regardless of which province they live in.
There should be agreed-upon rules as to how a ballot should be cast, and agreed-upon guidelines on how recounts are conducted. Also, the voting and recounting process should be entrusted to less partisan hands than the system allows for today.
In such a big country no voting system will ever be perfect, but a great deal can be done to reduce the ambiguity that has overwhelmed the election of 2000. This is a political crisis, not a constitutional one, but if the governed are to give their consent general elections cannot be seen to be as malleable as this one.
For starters: If a citizen makes a mistake and fails to follow instructions, as I did, the vote should not be counted, with no claims of ignorance and confusion to be considered - and, please, no divination of how voters might have intended to vote but clearly didn't.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe.
