Florida notebook

Miami

It’s a mild and tranquil December here in Florida, the headlines flickering with routine weirdness and depravity. Four years ago at this time, we were roiling in the acid-bath aftermath of a presidential contest that required 36 ridiculous days to resolve, and only then by a brazenly partisan vote of the United States Supreme Court. Our state was the infamous ground zero of that fiasco, and ever since then we Floridians looked forward to 2004 much as one would to an amateur colonoscopy.

On election day I fled far into Everglades National Park to contemplate my options. Like many, I anticipated a sordid replay of the 2000 stalemate. However I emerged to learn that the Sunshine State fell early and without drama to George W. Bush. The deciding controversy, brief as it was, would unfold in a couple of counties in Ohio. Florida was finally off the hook! Whatever lunacy comes out of Washington DC during the next four years, nobody can blame us. This time Bush seems to have been chosen by an actual mathematical majority of American voters, not just by friendly judges and a handful of Republican hacks in Tallahassee.

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James Tidmarsh

The African cardinal who terrifies Macron

Predictably, the Internet is pulsing with conspiracy theories about how the presidency was stolen, again, in Florida. One scenario has Bush supporters hacking into the new touch-screen voting machines and preprogramming them in advance of the election. Fuelling the rumour was this titbit: the chief of Diebold, a company that manufactures the machines, was a major campaign donor to the Republicans. Unfortunately for the conspiracists, the urban Florida counties that used the touch-screen devices produced vote tallies that were fairly consistent with the opinion polls and with prior voting patterns. Still another theory of chicanery focuses on rural counties in northern Florida that, despite a predominance of registered Democrats, voted heavily Republican.