Election 2000: listening to the other side

Some readers have taken issue with the choices of books we proposed about the election of 2000 (see Election rigging in Harlem?). Basically, their complaint is that some publications that defended the Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore didn't make the list.
While this Review makes no pretense of being a "balanced" forum (we strongly support progressive ideas, and fight conservative ideologies) we respect the canons of scientific discussion, and will try to convince those who held different opinions that we have good reasons to think what we think. In this particular case, we have no trouble in admitting that a couple of publications that offer serious arguments do exist. One is Richard Posner's book Breaking the Deadlock. Posner is a real conservative intellectual, a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit and one of the most influential American legal theorists. He has been too much controversial a personality to make to the Supreme Court, but half of the members of the Court today wouldn't qualify to be his clerks (to WHICH half of that body we think, we'll let you guess). In any event, his book should have been mentioned, and we apologize for not putting it on the list (not that we subscribe to a single paragraph of his conclusions, of course).
Another volume, this one a "balanced" book, is E. J. Dionne's and W. Kristol's Bush v. Gore. It offers journalistic commentary (Dionne is also a respected author of political essays, among them the brand-new Souled Out) but the book has value because it puts together the basics (various legal decisions, not only the last Supreme Court's per curiam opinion) and also a number of editorial stuff that offers a good deal of insight about the pundits' reasoning during those critical weeks.

Election rigging in Harlem?

Has the "example" of successful election rigging in Florida in November 2000 spread INSIDE the two parties? According to the New York Times in some precincts of Harlem not a single vote was cast for Barack Obama. That seems, well, difficult.
The investigation is under way, but the larger topic of the integrity of the elections in a federal system is not in the news. This is truly surprising, given the amount of literature created not only by the stolen election of 2000, but also by the strong suspicions cast over the critical results of Ohio in 2004, suspicions that are still alive today (see this). You can also find an analysis of various issues of 2004 presidential elections (in Italian) here.
Among the analysis of the Florida case, we recommend Jeffrey Tobin's Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election and Vincent Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President Of course, those books were hardly alone: in a more scholarly fashion, the issue was tackled by Robert Watson (Counting Votes), Mark Whitman (Florida 2000: A Sourcebook on the Contested Presidential Election), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Electing the President, 2000), Cass Sunstein and Richard Epstein (The Vote: Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court), Jarvis's Bush v. Gore: The Fight for Florida's Vote, and, more important, Roy Saltman: The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence. Saltman traces the evolution of voting technology, highlighting how the antiquated systems in use today are a legacy of the 1950s. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to disentangle the responsibilities of federal, state, and local authorities in monitoring and counting the votes. It would be even worse if the various factions inside the parties took advantage of these obsolete and undemocratic procedures to rig the primaries, too.