RALEIGH – It’s the first day back after New Year’s Day and we’re already making plans for some anticipated days off, given a forecasted 6-to-10 inches of white stuff in the Triangle area tonight.

If you get snowed in along with the rest of us, but keep your power and Internet connection, I’ve got a recommendation for you: spend a little time reading Einer Elhauge’s excellent new piece on the Florida election imbroglio.

Here’s the link: http://www.policyreview.org/DEC01/elhauge.html

Elhauge is a professor of law at Harvard University, which means he gets a lot of latitude to refer to (and gently make fun of) “my colleague Alan Dershowitz.” More importantly, Elhauge served as a counsel for the Florida House of Representatives during the 2000 election dispute. He had a front-row seat for the festivities and so enjoys a unique vantage point from which to comment.

I didn’t agree with everything Elhauge wrote in the piece, published by the Hoover Institution’s Policy Review. But I loved his debunking of the mythology that arose from the controversy. For example, punch-card machines were not more likely than optical-scanning machines to fail to count votes. If either technology allowed voters an instant opportunity to correct errors, the spoilage rate of the ballots was low regardless of the makeup or leadership of the county in question. If no such instant-feedback mechanism was available, there was a high spoilage rate (or voter-error rate, if you prefer). He also debunks attacks on the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Bush v. Gore from both the left and the right, the former charging hypocrisy and partisan bias and the latter questioning the Court’s constitutional authority.

Basically, Elhauge’s piece is a sober account of a decidedly non-sober affair. He makes a number of recommendations for improving the voting process, many worth consideration, but ultimately concludes that the outcome of the contest was appropriate, legally required, and perhaps inevitable (given that a variety of other shoes that didn’t drop, such as the state legislature’s intervention or the disallowing of Florida’s electoral votes, would still have resulted in a Bush victory).

Great but somewhat lengthy reading for the snow-bound.