Toobin’s analysis of the battle over the 2000 presidential election recount in Florida exposes any number of faults in the American democratic process. Ordinarily, the will of the electorate is fairly clear, and these faults do not effect the outcome of an election. In the extrordinarily close election between George W. Bush and Al Gore, however, our imperfect system ground to a near halt and left us with an outcome that in all likelihood did not express the will of the voters.

At the most basic level, the act of recording voters’ intentions is prone to errors. Sometimes errors arise from a faulty (though well intentioned) ballot layout, like the infamous Palm County “butterfly” ballot that almost certainly confused Gore supporters into voting for Pat Buchanan. At other times, voting machines introduce errors, as evidenced by the debate that was raged over dimpled and hanging chads.

Constitutionally, the vestigal Electoral College can leave what ought to be a national issue (the number of votes garnered by each presidential candidate) in the murky netherworld between the rights of states and those of the federal government. Toobin writes, “In the nationwide total, Gore defeated Bush by 540,520 votes, or .51 percent, which was more than four times greater than John F. Kennedy’s margin over Richard Nixon in 1960.” In other words, the election should never have devolved to a contest fought solely in Florida.

Most fatally, our two-party system makes impartial election oversight almost impossible: when nearly every political official is either a Democrat or a Republican, third-party observers a few and far between. For every even-handed actor in this account—Tallahassee Judge Terry Lewis receives special praise from Toobin—there are a dozen or more so-called public servants like Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris who are far more interested in partisan victories than in fairness and legality.

Toobin’s account is at its best when it describes, with morbid fascination, the interaction between the partisans called upon by Gore and Bush to wage the recount battle and the elected and appointed officials trusted by the American people to act in the public’s interest. Far too often, Toobin is able to document the partisans’ encroachment on the public interest.

In the end, however, it was the United States Supreme Court that called an end to the recount and provided no clear standard for impartiality, leaving the outcome of the election in the hands of a state government controlled by the brother of the election’s ultimate victor. Toobin reserves some of his harshest criticism for the land’s highest court:

Sadly, few states outside of Florida have taken substantive steps to ensure that the debacle of 2000 isn’t repeated. Perhaps the American electorate is too divided, and too firmly entrenched in a two-party duopoly, to care about electoral impartiality. Perhaps we’re just too lazy. Either way, democracy is the victim.