Awaiting the Fat Lady April 5, 2001February 19, 2017 John Seiffer: ‘Thanks to a mention on your site, I got a Handspring Visor last year for opening an account with what was then called DLJ direct. I waited the requisite time period and closed my account. Then they sent me a note saying if I funded my (now closed) account with $5k I could get another Handspring (which I’m in the process of doing) and now I find the offer’s available to all. There is no requirement to trade, you can keep the money in a money market. I’ll soon have enough handsprings to use as coasters.’ Before you all start writing to tell me, ‘See? Bush won Florida after all!’ please note that he almost certainly did not. I expect – but don’t know for sure – that the Wall Street Journal-New York Times consortium will report this a few weeks from now, when they are through counting not just the ‘undercount’ but also the ‘overcount.’ (The overcount is where, for example, someone circled Gore on the optical ballot, but then also wrote in, ‘Lieberman!’ or some such down below, rendering ‘the intent of the voter’ undiscernable to the machine – but clearly discernable to a human.) For a bit more on the voting scandal – widely reported in Britain but oddly undiscussed on this side of the Atlantic – click here. It is a remarkable story. And for Molly Ivins’ latest, click here. Molly pokes fun at the notion of a Bush mandate. And, really, about the only thing everyone agrees Geo W. and Congress have a mandate to do is to fix the election system so that every vote counts. After all, this is a big deal! A huge deal! The integrity of our democracy is at stake! So . . . where are the Congressional hearings on this? Why is no one in Congress getting to the bottom of this? Why are George and Jeb not making this a priority? Are the Republicans really concerned with what happened? (‘And shucks,’ Strom may be thinking, ‘was the old notion of white guys with property being the only ones who could vote really so bad?’ After all, all throughout his formative years, women didn’t have the vote. And until he was 62, many African-Americans were denied access to the polls – a situation a lot worse than, but not completely unlike, what they endured in Florida in 2000.) Tomorrow: Why Does Anyone Listen to Analysts?