When the Going Gets Weird...

By Carl Hiaasen/Islamorada

For years, the rest of America has been entertained from a safe distance by Florida's headlines, but our endemic weirdness can no longer be regarded as amusing local color. The very fate of the American presidency now rests in its slimy, surreal grip. As a native Floridian, I advise you to brace yourselves. Given our recent history, more bizarre twists are to be expected.

The last time an election here got so much attention was three years ago, when the race for Miami mayor was stolen with forged and phony absentee ballots. One belonged to a dead guy named Manuel Yip, who, it turned out, had been voting regularly from the afterlife. Further investigation revealed some 17,000 deceased persons on state voting rolls. (Note to Tim Russert: of the two presidential contenders, Bush stands to gain the most from a high Florida turnout of dead and fictitious voters, as they tend to be Republican.)

The Sunshine State is a paradise of scandals, teeming with grifters, deadbeats and misfits drawn here by some dark primordial calling, like demented trout. You would be surprised how many seek and attain public office.

One recent brouhaha involved the dubious residency status of a candidate for a Miami-Dade school-board seat, who claimed to be living in a toolshed on a farm. "Sometimes you make sacrifices for public office," he testified, and was promptly heaved off the ballot.

That's pretty much business as usual in Florida. One of our U.S. attorneys, Kendall Coffey, resigned in disgrace after allegedly biting a stripper during a table dance gone awry. He has now turned up on TV as an election-law expert for the Gore campaign. A former Miami-Dade commissioner has sought "refugee" status in Australia, following accusations that he partied with a hooker at a Biscayne Boulevard crack house. A few months ago, the mayor of Hialeah Gardens was convicted of soliciting to murder her ex-husband. The first place she went looking for hit men: city hall. Our tolerance for such controversial characters is epitomized by the welcome given O.J. Simpson, who moved here for the golf. Autograph seekers follow him down the fairways as if he were one of the Beatles.

Conspiracy theories about last week's vote are flying, but I'm skeptical. A plot of that scope would require levels of cunning and competence unheard of in Florida politics. If the national election was being stolen, it was probably by accident. The target more likely was some county-commission runoff or maybe a seat on the port authority. That the presidential nominees happened to appear on the same ballot was merely rotten luck.

Consider those goofy "butterfly ballots" in Palm Beach County. That was a mess, but not a plot. If you're going to rig the vote in a Democratic stronghold, you don't draw attention to the crime by shifting the tally to some right-wing drooler. Even Pat Buchanan was surprised to learn he had racked up votes in condominium precincts made up almost entirely of retired Jews. I suppose it's possible that they loved his position against free trade and have forgiven him for questioning the extent of the Nazis' responsibility for the Holocaust, but I doubt it.

So what really happened in Palm Beach? The elections supervisor says she wanted to make the ballot easier for seniors to read. I believe her because it's a vintage South Florida bungle--a bureaucrat tries to do something nice for a few old folks and winds up paralyzing the nation.

That isn't to say there's no election chicanery in our fair state. The odds of honesty prevailing in all 67 counties are slim, especially with the stakes so high. While TV news crews from around the world are encamped at the Breakers in Palm Beach, who's watching little Okaloosa County in the Panhandle? Not to worry, though: Cuba's Foreign Minister has offered to send observers to ensure a fair counting of the ballots. And you know they would be impartial, because the Foreign Minister declared of Bush and Gore that "one is as bad as the other."

A poetic end to Florida's vote crisis would bring the weirdness full circle, to another of our recent turns in the world spotlight. Don't be shocked if the entire presidential election shakes down to a single vote--an overseas ballot from Havana, bearing the childlike signature of one E. Gonzalez.

Hiaasen is a columnist for the Miami Herald. His most recent novel is Sick Puppy