BEFORE: Linking from "The Campaign", Jason Sudeikis was also in "Horrible Bosses" with Kevin Spacey...
THE PLOT: A chronicle of the weeks after the 2000 U.S. presidential election and the subsequent recounts in Florida.
AFTER: Depending on your age, you'll probably have one of two reactions to this film. If you're under 30, you may not believe how much trouble we had as a nation electing a president 13 years ago. If you're over 30, you may say, "Geez, that was already 13 years ago? The pain is still fresh..."
Yes, for two months in late 2000, after an election we had NO idea who our president was going to be, Bush or Gore. The legal challenges over what constituted a paper "vote" went all the way up to the Supreme Court. The poorly-designed paper ballots meant that senior citizens in Florida, many of them Jewish, might have accidentally cast their votes for Pat Buchanan, who I believe was running as a member of the Nazi party. (Wait, let me check on that, that doesn't sound right...)
There was also intense discussion over punched ballots that weren't punched all the way, or tiny pieces of paper that refused to cooperate and fall out of a punched hole. To further confound the problem, putting the ballots in a machine to recount them sometimes pushed the piece of paper BACK into the hole, making the ballot effectively a blank vote. Why would someone go all the way to the polling place to cast a blank ballot? Yet, as a result, every time they recounted the votes, the total changed, making for a quantum election - every time they looked at the result, the very act of looking at it changed the totals.
To this day, there are those of us who shudder when we hear about dimpled ballots, or hanging chads. Just to be safe, I think many people cut anyone named Chad out of their lives. And the U.S. lost all credibility as the standard-bearer for free elections in the world. I remember that in the following election, the U.N. even offered to send people around the country to ensure that we were able to guarantee free elections, an offer that was probably politely declined.
Following all of the debate over hard-to-read ballots, undervotes, miscounts, dimples, chads, most Americans didn't know which way was up. And then came the possibility of widespread election fraud, namely the Republicans disenfranchising minority voters by saying their names were too close to those of known felons. Literally hundreds of people who were turned away at the polls just because their name was similar to someone else's.
Alarmingly, Jeb Bush, the Governor of the state in contention, was the brother of one of the Presidential candidates, and nobody seemed to have a problem with that. Even more alarmingly, the person who was in charge of the logistics of the recount, Florida's secretary of state, was also George Bush's Florida campaign manager, and nobody envisioned that as a possible conflict of interest, either. Shouldn't the elections be managed by independent parties, or at least people not actively involved in either campaign?
Well, anyway, it's good to know that this all got straightened out, and now that we're using electronic voting machines in many districts, we'll never have another dispute over election results. Because I assume those machines are very, very hard to tamper with or hack in any way. And we now have some kind of unquestionable method of identifying people when they go to the polling places, right? And every person who wants to vote now gets to vote, and neither party has any interest in pulling anything shady, right? Good, I'm glad to hear it.
Because really, the American way is not "with liberty and justice for all", it's really procrastination. You'd think after holding elections 54 times we would have gotten better at it, and that just wasn't the case. Why? Because after each election people would say, "I wonder if there's a way to make this process better?" and then do exactly NOTHING about it for 3 years and 11 months. Surprise, it's time for the next election, and once again we've got an imperfect system.
So if you think about it, the best time to start eliminating voter fraud for the 2016 election is today. So, somebody, please get on that. While you're at it, figure out what to do if it snows on Super Bowl Sunday 2014, and build a breakwater outside of New York Harbor before this fall's hurricane season. (Mark my words, neither of those situations will be addressed until the last minute.)
As for tonight's score, I can't question the reality of the events depicted, but I can question whether they were relayed in a way that was entertaining. Mostly there's a lot of talking - meetings, phone calls, news reports - which is favored over doing, and I feel the need to penalize for that.
Also starring Denis Leary (last heard in "A Bug's Life"), Ed Begley Jr. (last seen in "The Accidental Tourist"), Bob Balaban (last seen in "License to Wed"), Tom Wilkinson (last seen in "Girl With a Pearl Earring"), John Hurt, Laura Dern, Bruce Altman, Bruce McGill, Mitch Pileggi.
RATING: 5 out of 10 strategy sessions
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