Knee-jerk opinions abound. Some say it's wrong that the candidate who gets the most votes nationwide might not get elected. Some say it's unfair for television networks to call races early. Some people are angry about ballots that befuddle seniors; others are mad at inaccurate vote-tabulating machines. Some people think it's unfair to have manual recounts; others think it's unjust not to have them.

A lot of Republicans think the Democrats are trying to steal the election.

A lot of Democrats believe the Republicans are trying to steal the election.

On the 24/7 talk shows, pundits and pollsters pontificate about insuring that "the will of the people" is carried out.

Excuse me, but what "will of the people" are we talking about?

Is the collective popular will behind the man who got 24.931 percent of the electorate to vote for him, or the guy who got 24.932 percent? I would suggest that it is solidly behind None of the Above.

The latest received wisdom is that the deadlock in the race between the Vice-President and the Texas governor is incontrovertible evidence that every vote counts.

Actually, it seems to me, it was more like a blindfold taste test between Coke and Pepsi. Millions of Americans voted, and we couldn't decide the difference, because our candidates have become little more than brands.

People in Florida are screaming "disenfranchisement" because the puny, passive act of voting is the only means by which most Americans experience the illusion of having a say in the way the country is being run.

But, I would argue, everyone was disenfranchised in election 2000, and it had nothing to do with how the arrows lined up with the punch holes on the ballots in Palm Beach.

The fundamental injustice in this election is not what the Florida Secretary of State does, not how the ballots were printed or counted, and not that the Electoral College gives small states more than their share of power.

Step back from the fray, and try some perspective. Consider this:

Corporate donors anointed George W. Bush the Republican candidate months before any American had a chance to vote.

Corporate and labor backers anointed Al Gore the Democratic contender months before any Americans had a chance to vote.

Four billion dollars was spent on all races nationwide, a billion of that on the presidential campaign.

The vast majority of that cash was spent on television ads crafted to push the right buttons among the particular groups of citizens that, when properly frightened, could be calculated to deliver the key states to the right candidate.

Each candidate conducted his campaign from a script. Every decision, every speech, every campaign appearance, every statement was calculated according to how it would deliver blocs of voters needed to win the battleground states.

Beyond certain partisan platitudes and buzzwords, neither candidate said anything about overriding principles. Neither offered a vision for the nation that was not tied to some focus-group-tested prescription. Neither candidate ventured into risky territory that might alienate some important group.

The two parties colluded to exclude third-party candidates from the debates and to downplay their significance. Near the end, when one campaign finally recognized a threat from one third party, surrogates were sent nationwide to conduct a scare-and-smear campaign against it.

Now that both candidates have failed to attract sufficient interest to win outright, their parties' spinners and spokespeople keep trying to put the blame somewhere else - on the system, on the machinery, on the other party, on Ralph Nader, on Pat Buchanan, on the networks, on the pollsters, on the ballots, on the machines that count them. Anything to avoid admitting their candidates were flawed, their processes corrupt, their principles long ago discarded.

Most disingenuous are arguments that the Electoral College is unfair. After all, both parties, to an unprecedented degree, calibrated their campaigns to winning the Electoral College, to the point of not bothering to visit or advertise in the majority of the states, simply because they were not "in play."

Both parties threw bones to their ideological wings and put all their resources into winning the muddy middle. Both avoided broad appeals to the hearts and minds of the masses and ignored the 50 percent of the Americans who don't vote. Both pursued the same strategy. It was like watching R2D2 and C3P0 quarrel: two canned campaigns playing out their programs.

After all this, to suggest that some tiny part of the American electorate has been disenfranchised because of some quirk of one state's vote-counting method is to fret over one bent blade of grass in an elephant stampede.

The sad truth is that American voters are all disenfranchised by money, the media, the image manipulators, the spinners, the focus groups and the two major parties they serve. Our presidential campaigns have been bought and sold, packaged and delivered, and our only role as voters is to squabble over the spoils. Now, shamelessly, both parties have unleashed the lawyers and the spinners who, like vultures, continue to pick at the carcass of a decimated electorate.

No wonder the rest of the world is laughing. Despite spending all that money, neither George Bush nor Al Gore could win the votes of more than one in four voting Americans. We should declare the election a double forfeit, put None of the Above in the White House for four years, and turn the energy now being wasted in squabbling about electoral injustices into trying to take back our democracy.

Michael Betzold is a Michigan-based freelance writer whose articles have appeared in many publications including The New Republic and The Witness. He is the author of four books: Appointment with Doctor Death, on Jack Kevorkian's assisted suicide campaign; Queen of Diamonds: The Tiger Stadium Story, with Ethan Casey, on baseball and stadium subsidies; End of the Line: Autoworkers and the American Dream, with Richard Feldman; and a surrealistic feminist baseball revenge fantasy novel, Casey and the Bat. See www.mbetzold.com for a complete publications list. Betzold is a locked-out former reporter for the Detroit Free Press and won an Emmy for his work on a PBS Frontline documentary on Kevorkian.

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