A few teensy mistakes in US election

Ike, now in Gainford - Gainford-in-Teesdale, he likes to call it - sends an account e-mailed to him from the Miami Herald. "The recount should be pretty entertaining," writes Dave Barron, "because Florida's number three industry, behind tourism and skin cancer, is voter fraud."

In Miami, for example, they had an election where the enfranchised dead outnumbered the living - they checked the results in the cemetery - and in one Palm Beach county precinct the "voting slips" were actually pizza coupons. "As of right now," adds Barron, "extra cheese has a slim lead over pepperoni, but Tim Russert says it's still too close to call."

Not, apparently, that the average Yank is bothered about all this psephology, and similarly long words like that. "Americans aren't that fond of colleges," adds the ribber Barron, "and electoral is too many syllables for most, anyway."

Whether enfranchised or otherwise, what the Miami Herald has to live with is that, like most of the other US media, they got it wrong - "a few teensy mistakes," concedes Barron.

"Oh, we were correct on the big stuff, such as what day the election was held, the names of the candidates and how many states there are but we messed up on some of the minor details such as who, technically, got elected president."

The Herald's big mistake was in taking its information from the telly, and the telly changed its collective mind more often than a State Building jumper with last-minute nerves.

Unlike Harry S Truman, Barron's passing the buck. "If you had hoped to inform yourself about the most important story in the world by watching TV news - the most expensive and sophisticated news-gathering operation in history - you actually wound up less informed than if you had spent the night staring at your refrigerator."

ASTATESIDE column once squatted in this very space, a lively and oft-irreverent offering written by the column's old friend Bill Taylor, a co-conspirator 30 years ago in the Bishop Auckland office above the money lender's. That he's now in Canada, and seeing the world with the Toronto Star, may explain its demise.

Our own little stateside sortie would have ended here, too - attention turned to more customary matters, like car registrations and cigarette cards - until Ike Dawson again started to re-route his trans-Atlantic e-mail a few more miles up the A67.

Until a decade ago, less probably, it would have been said that he had a lot of American pen-pals. What's the e-mail equivalent, a screen processor?

One of his messages is from Phyllis Bonville, at any rate, and is headed "Seminole tribe files lawsuit".

WHEREVER in US cyberspace Phyllis Bonville might be, Hutton Bonville is a hamlet just off the main road from Darlington to Northallerton. It's possible to have passed it every day for half a century and not to know that it exists.

The Echo's cuttings library offers yellowing chronicles of Hutton Henry, Hutton Magna, Hutton Buscel and quite likely Hutton Len, but not so much as a column centimetre on Hutton Bonville.

The photographic files contain a single picture, taken in 1961 and until now never used, of what's simply captioned Hutton Bonville church.

Memory suggests not just that it's in the middle of a field but that it's dedicated to St Laurence - the 4th Century Roman martyr who was roasted on a grid, whose emblem is a grid iron and who (in the curiously sadistic way of the Church) is the patron saint of cooks.

It may now be all that's good about Hutton Bonville, indeed all that remains of it - but if the American election has achieved nothing else, it has at last got the little old place into the pages of The Northern Echo.

THEY'RE having fun, the Americans. The bit about the Seminole is a claim that 19,000 Indians set to vote for George W Bush were so traumatised at the sight of all those arrows that their hands began to shake so uncontrollably they mispunched the ballot paper. The suit calls for the scalp of local election officials.

FROM Houston, meanwhile, Thomas R Henkel sends a notice to American citizens "that your Independence is to be revoked in the light of your failure to elect a president of the USA. Effective from today, Her Sovereign Majesty Queen Elizabeth II will resume monarchical duties over all states, commonwealths and other territories except Utah, which she doesn't fancy. Your new Prime Minister will appoint a Minister for America, without the need for further elections, in the transition to a British crown dependency."

Countless rule changes follow, of which the most amusing are that American football will be replaced by rugby - "similar but doesn't involve stopping for a rest every 20 seconds or wearing full kevlar body armour, like nancies" - and that Independence Day on July 4 will be replaced by a national holiday on November 8, but only in England. It'll be called Indecisiveness Day.

We have been unable to find anywhere called Hutton Henkel, but Hutton Henry's three or four miles west of Hartlepool.

SOMEONE'S also sent a letter to the Florida Lottery Commissioner, claiming that they'd have picked the six winning numbers but for the confusing form, which led them to select six entirely different ones.

"This is completely unacceptable and I ask you immediately to declare me the winner and to send me a cheque for $63m.

"My attorney tells me that there is a precedent. It has been set by your election commissioner."

SO finally back to Harry S Truman, to whom is also attributed the quote about always being sincere, even when you don't mean it.

More reliably, Truman wrote to his sister in 1947 of the responsibilities of the presidency: "All the president is a glorified public relations man who spends his time flattering, kissing and kicking people to do what they are supposed to do anyway."

Probably it still holds true. So perhaps one of Ike's e-mail boxers can explain what the fuss is about.

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