(November 29, 2000) -- On Sunday, Florida’s Secretary of State, Katherine Harris, certified Governor George W. Bush as the winner of Florida’s 25 electoral votes. That gives Bush a total of 271 electoral votes, an electoral majority.

After nearly two weeks of  legal debate between the two political parties, closure seemed to have been made when Bush won by a narrow margin of 537 popular votes. This week, however, Vice President Gore claimed that the Palm Beach recount was not conducted properly and that Miami Dade County’s refusal to recount was illegal, saying that “ignoring votes means ignoring democracy itself.” As a result of this decision, the nation is still left uncertain as to who will be the next president.  Like the rest of the nation, students and teachers at Clark have varying views on this issue.

Ira West, who teaches U.S. history and current events classes, said that initially the issue fascinated his students. However, he also said that recently they have lost interest because the election has become a “dragging legalistic battle.”

With Gore taking it to the Florida Supreme Court and  Bush appealing to the U.S. Supreme Court, the winner of this election may very well be decided by which side has the more powerful lawyers.

While West described the election as dragging, he also said that the most important thing is that the people’s votes are counted accurately and fairly. He said that the recounts are a reasonable way to  accomplish this.

However, Junior Mike Yu said that he is disgusted with the way the government is handling this situation and said he has “lost faith in the political system.”

“What kind of system lets a sore loser demand recounts of an election until he gets what he wants?” Yu asked.

While we do not know who our next president will be, one thing is for certain: a majority of the students asked at Clark agreed that this election has increased their interest in politics.
“The election was the center of attention for about a week,” said junior Diego Kim, referring to his U.S. history class. “That’s all we talked about.”