The Chosen People Who Can't Choose

By Joel Stein

After all the debates, the millions spent on commercials, the flash polling, the pretending to care about Social Security--it came down to my grandmothers. It has been 15 years since either side of my family has included them in a discussion of where to eat dinner, and the leader of the free world is going to be chosen by their inability to read a ballot. I'm pretty sure they were just looking for attention.

It doesn't shock me that some of the retired Jews in Palm Beach may have miscast their votes. Although both of my grandmothers, who live just a few miles south of Palm Beach, know more about politics than any person with a job, they are stymied by technology. My maternal grandmother, Mama I, is so defiantly anti-VCR and cell phone that whenever she reaches her friend Roz's answering machine, she hangs up on it and says, "What does she need with that for? Like she's some big business executive?"

Still, Mama I, who often calls me by the names of her other grandchildren, Lisa and Julie, was pretty sure the Palm Beach Buchanan votes needed to be reconsidered. "How could you believe that what's his name got so many votes?" she asked. She would not admit that the old people were to blame for their inability to read a basic form, though she did concede to trouble with other basic skills. "Driving. Oh, boy! You could write a book about that," she said. "They go where they want to go, that's all there is to it. They see someone on the street, they stop and talk. The horns are beeping; what do they care?"

My father's mom, Mama Ann, who lives just a few miles from Mama I, also blamed the ballots. "I tell you the machines are really a horror here," she said. "The lighting is bad. When you get older, you can't see well. I'm going to have to have these cataracts done one of these days."

But it turns out that voter fraud runs both ways. "The woman next to me couldn't see," Mama Ann told me. "The workers talk to one another. They don't pay attention. So I walked into her booth and punched Gore for her without anybody looking." This is going to be a long, drawn-out legal process.

The real question in Palm Beach is whether this scandal will be bad for the Jews. After spending months being concerned that Joe Lieberman would be blamed for a Gore loss, they now have to fear that they themselves will be the scapegoat. But Mama Ann saw a potentially positive aspect of the backlash. "Let them blame the Jews. It's about time they put some new machines in." Then after rethinking, she said, "There's enough trouble the Jews have. The blacks are up in arms too. I don't know why. Reverend Jacksy, Jacksy, what's his name has been rabble rousing in Palm Beach. You know, Florida is making a name for itself for being crooked. It is. Their police officers aren't the best. They're real rednecks, the police. I resent that they don't speak more English down here. I think it should be English first. But who am I, anyway?" I was starting to think that those Buchanan votes may not have been a mistake, after all.

So, in conclusion, yes, I would make fun of my own grandmothers for a column.