Florida Students Amused As Their State Makes Headlines

Their ability to differentiate Orange from Citrus, Bay and Lake from Gulf, Union from Dixie, and Madison from Jefferson and Washington has made them political experts.

And their ability to decide between Bush and Gore (and, in a few cases, between Gore and Buchanan) has made them the object of both national affection and hatred.

They're Harvard's Florida voters.

As Florida continues to count and recount and even hand-recount its presidential ballots, Harvard students from the Sunshine State have become instant pundits, ballot analysts, and defenders of their state's dignity.

But most of all they are just enjoying the attention.

"I'd rather have it happen in Florida than somewhere else," Palm Beach county resident Alex M. Rampell '03 says. "It makes me proud to be a Floridian. Because when it comes down to it, it's my county that's going to decide the President for the entire country."

In an election where a hundred million votes were cast, Harvard's Florida students say they were struck by just how meaningful their individual decisions were.

"It's very weird for me to think that my vote really matters," says Floridian Clay B. Tousey '02.. "Three hundred is a nice round number, and if it weren't for [me], it would be 299."

Reveling in the Spotlight

Across the country, most Floridians are either frustrated or just plain embarrassed at their state's inability to decide which presidential candidate received the most votes.

But most Harvard students from Florida say they relished the attention they are receiving from their now notorious home state.

"I'm not really embarrassed about it at all," says Kristen A. Doddo '03, a Miami-Dade county resident.

"It's kind of neat to turn on the TV and recognize the street they're broadcasting from," Palm Beach County resident M. Kate Richey '03 says.

These students defended their state, saying that any state with the fortune to be the epicenter of such a close election would show signs of voting irregularities when examined by the media microscope.

"You have to be ashamed a little bit that there are this many irregularities," Tousey says. "But no matter what state was held under the spotlight, there would've been some problems. It just so happens it was Florida."

"I'm sure there's plenty of corruption in other states that just didn't come up because the election wasn't close there," says Broward county resident Brad J. Hershbein '03.

While Florida has been ridiculed in the national media, on late-night TV, and by writers around the globe, students say most of the comments directed at them are just good-natured teasing.

"They come up to me and say 'you're causing so many problems, your dumb state again,'" Doddo says..

"There's always the occasional 'Oh you Floridians, you don't know how to vote,'" Richey adds.

One Jacksonville native deflects these barbs by turning on his fellow Floridians. Tousey says that most of the alleged voting irregularities occurred in South Florida, hundreds of miles from his hometown.

"Most of the attention so far has been on South Florida--which I have very little to do with-- and I'm proud of that," he says.

In fact, South Florida has had its history of problems with elections. Most recently, the entire 1997 mayoral election in Miami-Dade County was thrown out because of corruption and voter fraud.

"When I first heard that Florida was having a problem, I thought, 'Oh gosh. Not again,'" Doddo says. "In a way, it's typical Florida."

Palm Beach Blues

At the center of this controversy is Palm Beach County, where some claim that a poorly-designed "butterfly ballot" caused hundreds of Gore supporters to mistakenly vote for Pat Buchanan.

Harvard's Palm Beach County residents--like people across the country--disagree on the clarity of the infamous ballot.

Rampell says his county's absentee ballot was arranged normally, but adds that his family at home found the ballot at the polling place confusing.

But Rampell insists no one in his family voted for Pat Buchanan.

Richey, on the other hand, says she thought the county's ballot was quite clear.

"The fourth graders didn't find it confusing," she says, referring to a similar ballot with cartoon characters given to several elementary school students in an experiment last week.

Many of Harvard's Florida voters said they were confident Bush would eventually prevail, but all believed that whoever the eventual winner is will have a tough job ahead.

"Whoever is elected president, no one's really going to respect him. It's going to cause more problems than we're prepared for and ready to deal with," Doddo says.

But Rampell says regardless of how the turmoil plays out, we may never know the true story behind Florida's election chaos.

"I'm sure there's a bag of votes out there that has somehow gotten discarded that would've decided the election easily," he says.