By the time you read this, the 2000 election will be over, but as I write this in November, it's anything but over. Millions (if not billions) of people are delighting and agonizing over the drama, suspense, frustration, and sheer confusion of the American presidential election. It's also being analyzed to a fare-thee-well. Perhaps by now you're sick of it. I know the repetition is tiresome, but this is one civics lesson that deserves to be kicked around like the old proverbial football. So I'll give it another kick, imparting to it a particular spin.

Imagine this: A depressed presidential candidate is being driven through the rainy streets of a southern city. He's depressed because all the major television networks and their computer models have just said he has lost the state of Florida meaning in all likelihood the election. Only moments before, he had called his opponent with congratulations. It sticks in his throat. Now he's on his way to election headquarters to give a concession speech.

A pager chirps and an aide reads the call-from number. He opens his cell phone and dials. The caller is a top political operative in Florida. He says something like, "Have you seen the numbers on the Web site of the Florida Secretary of State?" It's probably a rhetorical question because Internet access hasn't been installed on the limo. He continues, "It shows Bush's lead down to only a few hundred votes, not the 58,000 reported by the networks." More phone calls ensue. The candidate arrives at the headquarters, but instead of delivering a concession, he calls his opponent and tells him to hold on because the votes are still coming in; it's going to be close.

Was it ever. You could make it up for a movie, but the true story would still be better. While the story unfolded it struck me that technology--the Web site, the pager, and cell phones--played a big role. Behind the story were the computers spitting out vote tallies and exit-poll models--wrongly, as it turned out--twice wrong.

Election night and the ensuing (and I do mean suing) days were rife with delectable ironies along the human-machine interface. The fun started with the Voter News Service dishing up a plate of purgamentum in the form of bad data. (I'm using the Latin from "Purgamentum init, purgamentum exit"--garbage in, garbage out.) Some of it came from a very badly conducted exit poll in Dade County, some from programmer errors with gathering data in the Florida Panhandle. The result was a premature proclamation that Vice President Gore had won the state.

A few hours later, egg still dripping from their faces, the networks did it again. This time it was because the suburbs of Dade County reported out of synch with the rest of the county. The returns made it look like Gov. Bush would win, suburbs generally being Republican country. Since all the networks looked at the same data, they called the state for Mr. Bush. Of course only a short time later, the rest of Dade County began reporting, and Bush's lead dwindled into one of the smallest in history. Not a good evening for computer models and the television news industry.

Then there was the irony of Bush talking most of the way through his campaign about trusting people and not trusting government (especially the feds) or the evil lawyers. Then he treated us to the most un-Republican spectacle by denouncing the hand counting of ballots in favor of the precision of machines, using the federal court system to block decisions normally left to the state courts, and (just like the Dems) flooding Florida with an army of high-priced lawyers. If the situation had been reversed, Gore would have done the same things, though it would have been a little less ironic for a Democrat.

Of course, much of the controversy came down to machines: the hoary punch-card readers. For those of us old enough to remember when computing generally operated with punch cards, the troubles with card readers should've produced a distinct puckering in the nether regions. Just about the only places in Florida that still used these relics for large numbers of voters were in the big metropolitan counties, Democratic counties at that. When voters don't quite cleanly punch their cards, the readers may not count correctly, thus setting up the significance of chad. Don't get me started on chad.

Then there was the big brouhaha about confusing ballots. Did you know most of this was the result of doing layout in a word processor? According to one report, the Palm Beach County official in charge of ballot design, the beleaguered Ms. La Pore, tried to use a ballot template document, but couldn't get it to format like the original, so she split the layout into two columns. Thus, the butterfly ballot was born. One can speculate that word processing will never be the same for her.

She, and it seems thousands of the county's constituents, were not format-savvy. This is no small thing. Psychologists have long been studying the effect of layout on our perception and have begun to call it "format literacy," under the broader category of human factors. We are creatures of pattern when it comes to visuals. The right patterns, those that evoke familiar shapes and locations, are read quickly and correctly. The wrong patterns are easily mistaken and take much more time to read. Examples of bad layout (or gestalt) are the butterfly ballot, bad advertisements, and most software.

A hundred years ago, the events in Florida would have taken days, if not weeks, to percolate through the country. This time, thanks to television, the Internet, cell phones, and other whiz-bang communications technology, millions of us knew everything that was happening either as it happened or as fast as we could switch channel, site, or call. Not surprisingly, the difficulty wasn't getting information but making sense of it.

The rush to turn exit polls into election results highlighted one of the perils of speed. The pressure to complete ballot counting was another. Historically, many elections have required months to count and verify. This year, polls taken just days after the election said the American people were tired of waiting.

That so many people became impatient so quickly seems odd, given the extraordinarily close election, but it highlights the continuing pressure to produce accurate results quickly. Many people are fulminating for an Internet voting solution. I say solution because there are many ways the Internet could be used--from voter registration to direct voting. Skeptics are quick to ask if we're serious about using the imminently hackable Net as a tool for voting. They may have a point, at least in the short run. Validation and security, though high priorities, are not yet fully reliable. I can, unfortunately, imagine court challenges to almost any kind of voting via the Internet at the moment.

While we're inclined to look at technology as simply a neutral medium or tool, this election showed that it could also become an active part of the political process and the center of controversy. I think we can expect more of it. The role of television and the Internet in providing information and setting opinions is increasing. Although one may be more mind-numbing and the other mind-liberating, both are going to have a strong influence on general political attitudes, and both are going to be unpredictable more than occasionally.

The electorate was clearly divided and very narrowly so. In the end, the presidential election came down to divining the intent of a few voters in just a handful of counties in one state. That intent had to be tested factually, legally, and in a sense, spiritually. Divining the voters' intent, within the unbelievably tension-filled context of presidential politics, required judgment, spiced with equal measures of stupidity and brilliance, arrogance and trepidation. It was a human drama writ large; what a show.

Editor at Large Nelson King also writes Enterprise Pursuits on ComputerUser.com, a weekly column discussing the perils of enterprise-level technology integration.