The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

RAY SUAREZ: Good evening. I'm Ray Suarez. Jim Lehrer is off tonight. On the NewsHour, the search for precision and a winner after a closely matched election. Kwame Holman and Margaret Warner report on the workings of the electoral college; Jeff Kaye reports on the recall of genetically modified corn in the human food supply; and Elizabeth Farnsworth interviews a recent winner of the National Book Award. It all follows our summary of the news this Thursday.

NEWS SUMMARY

RAY SUAREZ: There was no holiday break in the presidential election fight in Florida. Lawyers for Vice President Gore asked the state Supreme Court to order Miami-Dade County to resume its hand count. The court unanimously rejected the appeal this afternoon. Miami-Dade election officials decided yesterday to call off their recount. They said it was impossible to finish by the high court's Sunday deadline. A Gore spokesman said late today the Vice President will contest Miami-Dade's certified results and had no plans of conceding if they caused him to lose Florida. President Clinton commented on the situation. He said "all votes should count, including contested overseas military ballots." He spoke to reporters after finishing a round of golf in Maryland on his last Thanksgiving as President.

PRESIDENT CLINTON: I am thankful that I live in a country with enough faith in its democracy that we're all letting this play out. The comedy shows are having fun with it. We're all laughing about it. The two candidates seem to be in fairly good humor about it. When I was in Asia, I had a couple people tell me, you know, in some countries people would be in the streets over this. They said we trust our system. We just have to trust it. And whether we agree with it or disagree, let it play out. I think it's going to work out. I just hope we don't run out of time.

RAY SUAREZ: And the counting went on today. In Broward County election officials continued hand counting ballots to make the Sunday cut-off. Governor Bush still had an overall lead of 930 votes over Vice President Gore. According to unofficial Associated Press numbers the margin has shrunk to 713 votes. Meanwhile, Gore spent a quiet holiday with his family, his official residence in Washington. In Austin, Bush began the day with a one-hour jog pausing outside the Governor's Mansion to wish Americans a Happy Thanksgiving. He later had dinner with his family. Bush's running mate, Dick Cheney, remained in a Washington hospital recovering from a very slight heart attack. A hospital spokeswoman said he was in good condition and could be released as early as tomorrow -- another recount in the U.S. Senate race in Washington where Democrat Mary Kantwell led incumbent Republican Slade Gorton by about 1900 votes with all counties reporting. That was enough for an automatic recount under state law. It's to begin on Monday. Should challenger Kantwell win, the United States Senate would be split: 50 Democrats, 50 Republicans. Israeli soldier was killed by a Palestinian mortar bomb today at an Israeli-Palestinian Liaison Office in Gaza. The liaison sites are among the last remaining points of contact between the two sides. Ten of them operate in Israeli-controlled territory. In response to the shelling, the Israeli army ordered Palestinians to leave all the offices, but so far the Palestinians have refused to depart. Americans celebrated Thanksgiving today. Volunteers served dinners to the poor and homeless at community centers, fire houses, churches and shelters like this one in Washington, DC. And in New York City, thousands turned out for the 74th Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade where Mickey Mouse was back after an 18-year absence. He was one of 14 giant balloons that floated down Broadway. That's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to the tie vote for President, the electoral college, a recall of genetic corn and a National Book Award winner.

FOCUS - ELECTION MATH

RAY SUAREZ: Who knew counting could be so complicated -- an initial count, several recounts, machine counts, hand counts, dimples, chads and so on. While law and politics will determine the outcome, science may offer some insight. Here's where things stand. Nationwide, Al Gore received 50,133,912 votes -- George Bush, 49,805,216. That's a difference of 328,696 votes out of 103,772,392 cast. In Florida, the current official tally shows George Bush with 2,911,872 votes; Al Gore with 2,910,942 votes. A difference of 930 votes out of 5,960,712 cast. Joining me now is mathematician John Allen Paulos of Temple University. His books include "Innumeracy" and "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper." And physicist Neil Gershenfeld, director of the "Things that Think" program at the MIT media lab. He's author of the book "When Things Start to Think."

John Allen Paulos, let's start with you. When a mathematician looks at a spread, like this one, of fewer than a thousand votes out of about 6 million cast, what do you see?

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS: The results are indistinguishable from chance. Were one to flip a coin six million times, the difference between the number of heads and the number of tails would be comparable. It's less than, to use a technical term, one standard deviation from 50-50. So it is essentially a tie. The interesting thing about the race, I think, is that the imponderables are so much greater than the margin of victory, the margin of error is so much greater than the margin of victory - 20,000 votes in Duval County, 15,000 in Seminole County, the 3,000 butterfly ballots. These numbers swamp the 900-vote difference or the 700-vote difference between the candidates. And were there to be another recount, the numbers would be probably considerably different. Gore might be ahead if we recounted the whole state. Bush might be even further ahead.

RAY SUAREZ: But we don't do ties in American politics. I mean, you're looking at this through the eyes of someone who works with numbers, but we don't have a system that sort of embraces two candidates getting the same number of votes.

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS: That's true. It's a problem. We need something. Whether we resort to a randomizing device, a poker hand or a coin flip, a commemorative Bush-Gore coin flip in the rotunda in the capital building in Tallahassee or not, something has to be done -- perhaps a sudden-death debate on the Lehrer NewsHour. If Gore sighs before Bush smirks, he loses; if Bush smirks before Gore sighs, he loses. but some sort of randomizing device or split the electors. But, short of that it's not clear where we're going. I mean, any result is going to have a large degree of arbitrariness in it.

RAY SUAREZ: Neil Gershenfeld, is there such a thing as a technological fix for this problem?

NEIL GERSHENFELD: There certainly is, but understand this isn't a moon shot. This is really an excusably archaic technology. Punch cards were invented in 1890 and thrown bout in 1960 by everybody but the politicians. And, in fact, it's interesting to go back to see where chads came from. In the '40s and '50s, there was a keyboard invented by a Mr. Chadless to punch cards without leaving a tab that would gum up the main frame. And so what was left was called a chad. And those were shutting down main frames that were causing problems in the '40s and '50s. That's why the punch cards were gotten rid of it. Very modest technology could do an accurate count of what people intended to do.

RAY SUAREZ: In the political debate surrounding the count, we've set up this continuum where at one end there are those who say that bringing people back into the process would take out some of the randomness and bring back some of the accuracy and at the other end of this continuum, there are people saying, no, no, putting machines back at the center of this question will assure accuracy of the count. What do you think of that continuum?

NEIL GERSHENFELD: The important thing to understand is there are deep questions about the role of technology in our society, and they're not posed by this election. This election used ancient technology. There's just a few modest steps. You need to have feedback to confirm from the machine, did the person do what they intended to do? And you need to securely distribute the data on a network to get it where you want it to go to. Those aren't deep questions. With those you can get an accurate count. So this discussion of machines doesn't distinguish between bad machines that don't work well, which is what was used in Florida, and modest technology that is within a few decades of the present that would work well that would address those problems.

RAY SUAREZ: But perhaps it does to the extent that some people feel more faith when they see you put a stack of cards into a sorting machine that counts them, there is a feeling that some people bring to that action that has... they have more faith in what the machine comes up with than people sitting around a table counting by hand.

NEIL GERSHENFELD: Good technology, you don't think of technology. My pen is technology but it works so well you don't think of it as a machine. And that's how voting should be. The machines you see chunking away might be satisfying because they make a big noise and people stand around them. But for decades we've just known they're not reliable machines. A good voting machine easily, like say an ATM, would count what you intended to do, and this discussion would go away and you wouldn't ask, should we use the machine? It just works so well that you stop noticing it as a machine.

RAY SUAREZ: John Allen Paulos, let me go back to you on this question of faith. A lot of the integrity of our system comes from the credibility that we as an electorate bring to the results. They are credible because we believe them and we believe them because they're credible, in this great big circle. But you mentioned before that when the result is smaller than the margin of error, we start running into problems.

JOHN ALLEN PAULOS: Right. I think to some extent, you were talking about old technology, I mean I'm being hyperbolic here but measuring the difference between Mr. Bush and Mr. Gore's totals is somewhat akin to measuring the length of a bacteria with a yardstick. The system in Florida at present isn't sufficiently precise to register such fine discriminations. I mean, there are things that can be done as Neil just mentioned. I mean, one thing is besides it confirming the voter's intent, a machine could make it impossible to vote for two candidates for President, let's say. The 20,000 votes that are under dispute, they're not under dispute but that were thrown out in heavily Democratic Duval County, for example, because people voted for two candidates for President, there were a few on the next page and people thought they were a different office, all of those votes would not be cast because the machine would say, "you can't do this." So, you'd have 20,000 more votes in this case for Mr. Gore. So, comparably to the problem in Seminole County with absentee ballots, the election officials work them out. If they're thrown out, once again, Mr. Gore wins, that problem wouldn't exist had we an adequate technology, nor the problem Neil just mentioned. People voting for Mr. Buchanan by mistake because the machine would say, you have registered a vote for Mr. Buchanan -- is that what you intended to do? Everyone is familiar-- not everyone-- but most people are familiar with buying items on Amazon, for example, and before you submit your final order, it says are you sure that this is the book you ordered and you press yes or submit and you get the book you want instead of some random book that you accidentally ordered because you mistyped a letter.

RAY SUAREZ: But there we go, back to Neil Gershenfeld. We're talking about visibility and faith in the result. Computers may be more accurate than punch cards, but there's something unseen about the way it works. What may be satisfying in some people's view is that a punch card, you can see what you've done, somebody else can see what you've done. And then a week from now, you can look at that same card and see what you've done, but you can't necessarily do it with a computer or at least not in a visible, obvious way.

NEIL GERSHENFELD: This focus on the punch cards really is just an awkward adolescence in how we use information technology. Ancient machines like, say, a piano is technology and you trust it. You don't think about how it works and the Internet is technology. You don't think about how it works. And you trust it. This punch card, we focus on do we trust it so much because, in fact, it is reliable? There's just decades of experience that shows, as a device, it doesn't work well. What I really want to underscore is there's very modest technical steps that give us machines that are so trust worthy you don't really have to think about it. You don't have to wonder when you close a light switch, will the light turn on? Voting very much easily can be like that with these small steps.

RAY SUAREZ: John Gershenfeld, Neil Allen Paulos, thanks to you both.

FOCUS - COLLEGE OF CONTENTION

RAY SUAREZ: Now to the prize in this "down to the last vote" contest: Victory in the electoral college. The 2000 presidential election has raised new questions and demands form changes in this old institution. We start with some background from Kwame Holman.

KWAME HOLMAN: There's a very real possibility Al Gore could win the popular vote nationwide but fall short in electoral votes and lose the election. Curtis Gans, with the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, says that's happened before.

CURTIS GANS: That was true in 1824 when Andrew Jackson won more of the popular vote. That was true in the case of Samuel Tilden, who received more of the popular vote, I think in 1876 and it was true in 1888.

KWAME HOLMAN: And it could be true in the year 2000. That's because voters this year, as in every presidential election, actually chose "electors" not a candidate. Voters in Florida could read a printed reminder of that fact right on the ballot. A vote for the candidate will actually be a vote for their electors.

SPOKESMAN: These are the people who actually elect the president.

KWAME HOLMAN: On election day in Florida, for example, a group of pro-Bush electors competed against Gore electors. The eventual winner of Florida's popular vote will have his electors chosen as well ---- 25 electors, each representing one of the state's 25 electoral votes. Across the country, there is a total of 538 electors or electoral votes. Two electors from each state correspond to that state's U.S. Senate representation for a total of 100. Then there's one elector for every member a state sends to the House of Representatives: 435 in all. Washington DC, which is not a state, chooses three electors. To get to the White House, a candidate must win the popular vote in enough states to collect 270 electoral votes. With official vote counts still outstanding in Oregon, New Mexico and Florida, Al Gore has totaled 255 electoral votes, winning 19 states. George W. Bush has 246 electoral votes capturing 29 states. If all goes as planned, the winning candidate's electors will gather in 50 state capitals on December 18.

SPOKESMAN: They cast their votes in December and the votes are kept and unsealed in January, and then the President is officially elected.

KWAME HOLMAN: But the electoral system includes a few variations. First, no federal law requires an elector to vote for the party's candidate. And over the decades, a handful of electors has strayed. In 1976, for example, an elector pledged to Gerald Ford voted for Ronald Reagan, who had lost to Ford in the Republican primaries. In 1988, a Democratic elector flipped the ticket, choosing Michael Dukakis for Vice President and running mate Lloyd Bentsen for President. A second variation, exceptions to the state winner-take-all rule: In Maine and Nebraska, the winner in each congressional district wins that electoral vote. To some, the system seemed antiquated and indeed a serious effort to abolish the electoral college was mounted in 1969. But the system survived.

CURTIS GANS: We see in this election both the down sides and the up sides of the electoral college. The down side is obviously that we might end with a result in which the popular vote winner doesn't win the electoral votes. And the other down side is that most of the fire power in this campaign has been concentrated in 17 states: The ones that are contested. And the whole series of other ones that are not contested don't get any attention at all. On the other hand, on the up side, you have a situation in which in those states that are contested you are getting a lot of activity, you are going to the grass roots, you are taking into account regional and local concerns, you are mobilizing various interests. And none of that would happen if you moved to direct election because essentially what you would have would be a national media campaign in which the pluralism of America democracy would be ignored.

KWAME HOLMAN: Several members of Congress now say they're prepared to mount another challenge to the electoral college. But it's not something Al Gore wants to focus on right now.

RAY SUAREZ: Margaret Warner takes it from there. She taped this discussion last night.

MARGARET WARNER: A post election Gallup poll for CNN, and USA Today found that 61% of Americans think it's time to abolish the electoral college and elect presidents directly based on the popular vote. To debate the merits of that proposal, we're joined by four academics who have written widely on this subject: Charles Lipson, a political science professor at the University of Chicago; Lani Guinier, a professor at Harvard Law School; Gary Glenn, professor of political science at Northern Illinois University; and Judith Best, also a political science professor at the state university of New York at Cortland.

Professor Lipson, beginning with you you're an advocate of abolishing the electoral college. Why?

CHARLES LIPSON: Well, the basic reasons for having an electoral college were set out over 200 years ago and none of those reasons apply anymore. The basic reasons were that the founders, the men-- and they were men-- who wrote the Constitution-- wanted to put a kind of buffer between the people and the selection of a President. They wanted, on the one hand, a democracy but on the other hand some buffer from the tumult of the crowd. Also, some of the individual states were concerned that if you voted one person, one vote, the southern states, which had a lot of slaves, would have less weight. None of those reasons apply anymore. We can... we don't need a buffer between the individuals and the vote. Most of us think we're voting for a President. Our basic principle of a democracy is one person gets one vote, and in general I think that there are a number of specific problems that can crop up with the system: Unfaithful electors, the number of electors that each state gets is based on the last census, which in this case was a 1990 census. So some states have that have lost population, are over weighted. Others like....

MARGARET WARNER: Let me interrupt you right there because you've already laid out a couple of reasons and go to Professor Glenn. Take head on that argument that, one, it's really outlived its original purpose and, two, that it violates the sort of American principle of one man, one vote.

GARY GLENN: My first response is that it has not outlived its original purposes especially the purpose of protecting sparsely populated states from being steamrollered by numerical national majorities. That is a constitutional principle of our system of government, not "one man, one vote" by itself. We count the popular vote in the electoral college and we count it by state, just the same way we count the popular vote for the House of Representatives and for the Senate. We don't have any constitutional offices at the national level that are elected by a mere popular majority, irrespective of geography.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me interrupt you for a second just to explain. So you are saying that it protects the smaller states because, in effect, they get more weight, that is, because they get these two automatic ones for their Senators plus then one apportioned by population?

GARY GLENN: Yes. They get more weight in the same way that they get more weight in the House of Representatives where every state, regardless of population is guaranteed one vote, one congressman, and they get more weight in the Senate where every state, regardless of population, gets two Senators.

MARGARET WARNER: Lani Guinier, you want to abolish the electoral college. Make your case.

LANI GUINIER: Well, the first thing I'd like to say is the premise for the electoral college was not based on protecting rural states, per se, it was based on protecting the ability of southern plantation owners to get a vote not only for themselves but for their property. And so the southern plantation owners got one vote for themselves and then they got three-fifths of a person, so they got to vote for all of their slaves with this two-fifths discount. And I think that that is an illegitimate source that we have to confront when we talk about the electoral college. That's number one. Number two, the issue of abolishing the electoral college doesn't necessarily mean that the only alternative is direct election with a simple majority rule. Several people have talked about something called instant run-off voting, which would give people the opportunity to rank-order their preferences for presidential candidates and, therefore, if some of the rural states or some of the less populated states wanted to prefer a particular candidate and organize around that person, they could do so without necessarily, quote, wasting their votes.

MARGARET WARNER: What would be the advantage of that? What's wrong with a system now that essentially channels a lot of votes to one of the two major parties?

LANI GUINIER: Well, the problem with the present system is that it encourages the major parties to essentially avoid developing local political organizations and just go over the heads of political organizations directly to the voters through television, and that essentially transforms an election into the selling of a product rather than mobilizing voters at the local level. So the assumption that it is the electoral college that is protecting local interests, I think, is false.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Best, how do you come down on this question?

JUDITH BEST: Well, I support the electoral vote system, not the electors but the electoral vote system because it produces the right winner. And the right winner is the candidate who can govern this vast and diverse country because he has formed a broad cross-sectional, federal coalition. He has won the popular vote in enough states. And I agree that the federal principle is the fulcrum of our entire constitutional system. The Constitution itself was ratified state by state, but more than that, the federal principle in presidential elections makes the President sensitive to state and local issues. So, it supports the balance between national and local issues, but more than that, it also supports the separation of powers. If, for example, as the main thrust of the reform movement seems to be and has been, direct popular election, non-federal election, if the President were elected by a national plebiscite, then you tip the balance of power between the President in Congress dangerously towards the President who can then claim to be the only authentic voice of the will of the people. I'd explain it to people this way: Baseball fans understand that the World Series, the right winner in the World Series is the winner of four out of seven games, not the one that scores the most runs overall. And likewise, the right winner in the presidential elections is the man who can govern because he builds a very broad coalition and gains the consensus of the minority because this system gives them the opportunity to be a part of the majority in many states and many, many minorities.

LANI GUINIER: Could I just respond to one thing that Professor Best is saying. -

MARGARET WARNER: Yes.

LANI GUINIER: I think her baseball analogy is very apt for her point of view, but it is a flawed premise if we're talking about democracy. That is, this is not about identifying the winner of a game. This is about trying to encourage people to participate in the decisions that affect all of us. So I think the focus should be on how do we get more voters invested in the political process, how do we count their votes, how do we assure that more people participate and not simply how do we choose between one of two-- in my view-- flawed candidates? So I don't think the focus should be just on the winners but also on the participants, on the voters, on the citizens who are the governors in a democracy.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Professor Lipson is trying to get in here. We haven't heard from him for a while. Go ahead, sir.

CHARLES LIPSON: It seems to me that the real problem here is that the bedrock principle of our country is one person, one vote. I grew up in a period in which rural districts were substantially over represented. Happily we've done away with that kind of an approach. And I think that most of the original rules for the electoral college that, if a group of wise people got together, that they could have the flexibility to choose their own person, none of that makes any sense anymore. I do think that the Constitution is hard to modify. That's a good thing. We shouldn't do it easily. But I think this is a case where the clear principle of one person, one vote should prevail, and any candidate who hopes to win will have to put together a wide coalition. He or she will have to go into the states and mobilize voters for turnout, if for nothing else. So I'm not taken by a lot of these other counterviews.

MARGARET WARNER: Let me get....

GARY GLENN: Margaret, can I respond?

MARGARET WARNER: This is Professor Glenn, I hope.

GARY GLENN: Yes, it is.

MARGARET WARNER: Please take on, if you will, say whatever you'd like to say but take on this argument we've heard....

GARY GLENN: I want to do the one man, one vote.

MARGARET WARNER: And the participation argument too.

GARY GLENN: If American democracy is one person, one vote then the House of Representatives is undemocratic because it's not elected on one person, one vote nor is the Senate of the United States elected on one person, one vote. They both are elected on one person, one vote within an electoral district that exists within a state.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. What about -

GARY GLENN: And the President is elected in exactly the same way. So we have one person, one vote for electing the President, contrary to what Professor Lipson says, but we count the votes by state, not as an aggregate national total.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. But let me ask you to address -- let me just ask Professor Glenn to address this other question though that I think viewers may be more interested in than the one person, one vote even which has to do with participation and how much people feel that they're even being campaigned to or included in the process if they live in one of these states that is just considered a sure win for one candidate or the other. What's wrong with that argument?

GARY GLENN: Well, first of all, I don't know of any evidence supporting it. And I would ask Professor Lipson this question: Without the electoral college, would there be any presidential campaigning from the Mississippi River to California? Those are large, sparsely populated areas and there would be less reason than there now is with the electoral college for candidates to campaign in those areas. As a matter of fact, this year the hotly contested areas were largely states in... that are in the Midwest and the near West and so they got a great deal of attention.

CHARLES LIPSON: But that's the current system.

MARGARET WARNER: Ms. Guinier, I'll get right to you. Just, Professor Lipson, quickly on that point.

CHARLES LIPSON: That's the current system. It seems to me that Denver and Houston and Dallas and a lot of cities-- Salt Lake perhaps-- would be seriously contested. So I just don't see that as a serious impediment to having a true nationwide campaign.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Best.

JUDITH BEST: I'd like to suggest that it's incorrect to say that a vote doesn't count in Texas because Texas was not a battleground state. Of course, it counts unless there's fraud. And it has an impact. It has an impact on the popular vote, which is recorded. It has an effect on whether a president has a mandate or not -- how high the mandate will be. It has an effect on the subsequent governing aspect. So I don't think it's fair to say that it doesn't count. I think further that it's untrue that candidates would campaign all across the country. I think that they would then focus on the populous eastern megalopolis, Boston to Washington. They would focus on California; they would focus on major media markets. And then the people in small states would never see a candidate.

MARGARET WARNER: Professor Lani Guinier.

LANI GUINIER: First of all, there are people in a number of small states that never saw a presidential candidate this year even with the electoral college vote. But secondly, it's not just whether your vote counts but whether your vote counts equally. An electoral college vote in Wyoming was worth 71,000 voters. In Florida, one electoral college vote was worth 238,000 voters. So that is a huge disparity that not only violates one person, one vote, but also violates the principle of democracy that everyone should vote for a candidate who ultimately can represent their interests. So this is not just about, as I said earlier, picking a winner. This is about trying to figure out a system of elections that is responsive to the intent of each voter who casts a ballot. I think the problem with the way we're framing the discussion tonight is that we're assuming that you either have the electoral college or you have direct presidential elections, and that's it. There are many other alternatives. If you look around the world, most other democracies have much higher levels of voter turnout. They don't use the electoral college for sure. And they have modified direct election for President, and that's where the instant run-off vote becomes appealing.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Ladies and gentlemen, I'm sorry. We have to leave it there. But we'll return to it. Thanks so much.

RAY SUAREZ: Still to come on the NewsHour tonight, a genetic recall, and the National Book Award winner.

FOCUS - GENETIC RECALL

RAY SUAREZ: Now a corn controversy. Jeffrey Kaye of KCET.-TV-Los Angeles reports from Iowa.

JEFFREY KAYE: The elevator in superior has serviced farmers in northwest Iowa for 80 years. Loads of newly harvested grain are shipped in, stored and moved out. Among other customers, the elevator supplies the giant Archer Daniels Midland processing plant in Cedar Rapids. It turns corn into a variety of food products as well as ethanol. But that food chain was broken in October. Tests of a trainload of corn from Superior showed it contained "starlink." That's a genetically altered corn; it's been banned by the US Environment Protection Agency for human use because it may cause allergic reactions. ADM rejected the shipment. So superior elevator manager Gary Strube sold it for animal feed, which is an approved use.

GARY STRUBE: Roughly this last train that left here cost about $22,000.

JEFFREY KAYE: You lost that much?

GARY STRUBE: Lost that much.

JEFFREY KAYE: Strube found himself at the center of a high-tech agricultural uproar involving the genetically modified super seed. "Starlink" was supposed to be a boon to American farmers, but instead it's turning into a multi-million dollar disaster. The "starlink" furor started in September after Friends of the Earth, an environmental group, discovered "starlink" corn in taco shells. By the end of October, nearly 300 corn products were recalled, the first-ever involving a genetically-modified crop. The fact that "starlink" had made its way into the food supply-- and might have stayed there if not for the environmental group-- called into question the marketing, planting, handling and regulation of genetically-engineered seeds.

NEIL HARL: So this kind of a plan has...

JEFFREY KAYE: According to Neil Harl, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University, the discovery sent shock waves through the agricultural world.

NEIL HARL: It's a shot across the bow of biotechnology, agricultural biotechnology. The important point is that the world is watching to see if we are capable of handling the technology that we, the United States, have created here. For if we are not capable of handling it, this will have, I think, an adverse effect upon our products in world channels.

JEFFREY KAYE: Corn is a multi-billion dollar food industry. Giant processors turn the grain into products used in chips, sweeteners, starch, oil, flour, and cereals. In Iowa, the economy depends on corn production. Iowa exports corn to 55 countries and produces 19% of the domestic corn. Farmers there planted 135,000 acres of "starlink"-- 40% of the US "starlink" crop. "Starlink" seemed like a good idea to farmers Dave and Diane Marty of Lu Verne, Iowa. They planted 160 acres of it, hoping it would control a serious pest. "Starlink" has been genetically modified so as to be poisonous to a corn-munching caterpillar, an insect blamed for yearly crop losses of a billion dollars.

DAVE MARTY: This plant is naturally toxic to your European corn borer, and that's why we planted it. And it also has some resistance to the rootworm beetle and that's why we use it. We're using it to actually cut back on pesticide use.

JEFFREY KAYE: But why would farmers plant corn if they could not sell it for human consumption? The farmers had reason to believe "starlink" would be approved by this year's harvest.

DAVE MARTY: We were all hoping and it should have been cleared for food use too, domestic use.

JEFFREY KAYE: The seed was produced by a subsidiary of French-owned Aventis, the world's largest agrochemical company. Aventis would not provide a spokesman for this story. More than 90% of "starlink" was sold by based-based Garst Seed Company.

DARRELL STALEY: I think "starlink" was very important to Garst because it was a new technology that nobody else had at the time.

JEFFREY KAYE: According to Darrell Staley, a former district sales manager, Garst officials told their sales staff that "starlink" would be approved for human consumption before the harvest.

JEFFREY KAYE: What was the message you were told to deliver to farmers about the use of this?

DARRELL STALEY: Well, that the approval for European production was in the works, and the EPA or whoever was supposed to approve it in Washington, DC, was working on it and should be approved by harvest time.

JEFFREY KAYE: A Garst spokesman, who would not go on camera, admitted Garst told its sales force that the EPA, the US Environment Protection Agency, was expected to deem "starlink" fit for human consumption by the harvest. The seeds' developer, Aventis, has pressed for approval but the EPA has made no such decision. When it approved "starlink" in 1998, the agency ruled that it would have to be kept separate from other corn. But former Garst employees say the seed company failed to emphasize that requirement. As a result, Randy Schleusner is now sitting on 60,000 bushels of consider starlink", some of which he fed to his livestock. The elevator that normally takes his grain won't buy "starlink." He bought and sold seed for Garst but he says he was never told to warn customers about the requirement for special handling.

RANDY SCHLEUSNER: Well, at the time, I mean, there really wasn't any. I did not know of anything - if it was going to create a problem. If I knew it was going to create a problem, I would have told them to take the damn stuff back last spring. I would not have planted it, plain and simple.

JEFFREY KAYE: EPA officials expected "starlink" would be carefully separated from other corn at every stage in the production pipeline: During planting, growing, harvesting, transportation, storage and processing. That condition was a task the industry wasn't prepared for.

NEIL HARL: Unfortunately, the world doesn't operate so neatly as that. It isn't just the amount from the acreage that was planted with "starlink." It's that this has been multiplied by virtue of contamination, by virtue of pollen drift, by virtue of commingling. And so we were not equipped to handle a two-track system: One for "starlink" and one for everything else.

JEFFREY KAYE: In the fields, the most painstaking precautions can be undone by a gust of wind, which can carry "starlink" pollen to non-"starlink" crops where it can cross pollinate. As a result, farmers now have to treat their entire corn crop as if it were "starlink".

DAVE MARTY: So I'm sitting on -- probably 100% of all my grain corn this year is going to be "starlink."

JEFFREY KAYE: Because you've planted your "starlink" right next....

DAVE MARTY: Right next to regular hybrids and what's happened for us, for us to save ourselves, maybe being in trouble we're going to have to call it all "starlink."

JEFFREY KAYE: After the recall hit, elevators, which store grain, found to their surprise that "starlink" had been mixed in with other corn deliveries.

GARY STRUBE: We knew "starlink" was being planted. But, you know, hopefully everyone was going to do the right thing.

JEFFREY KAYE: Which would have been what?

GARY STRUBE: Which would have been to keep it separate, kept it at home.

JEFFREY KAYE: And told you if they were bringing it in.

GARY STRUBE: Yeah.

JEFFREY KAYE: And did anyone tell you if they were bringing it in?

GARY STRUBE: No, they didn't.

JEFFREY KAYE: Because there is no way to identify "starlink" grain short of chemical tests, Gary Strube says he has to consider all 5 million bushels of corn already in his elevator contaminated, fit only for animal feed. Throughout the area, the purity of the corn is under suspicion.

NEIL HARL: It is, I think, safe to say that every load is a suspect load until it's tested, at least in parts of the country.

JEFFREY KAYE: So guilty until proven innocent, essentially?

NEIL HARL: That's about the way it works.

JEFFREY KAYE: Fearing loss of consumer confidence, a few industry giants temporarily shut down corn processing plants to ensure that no "starlink" go into their foods. At ADM in Cedar Rapids, inspectors now take samples from truckloads of corn and test for the presence of "starlink." They reject two or three loads a day out of four or five hundred.

SPOKESMAN: Ticket numbers up to 372 are okay to dump.

JEFFREY KAYE: Aventis has pledged to buy up the "starlink" crop if it was grown, stored and shipped according to EPA's conditions. Which raises another issue: Whose job was it to ensure that "starlink" was handled properly? The EPA expected Aventis to enforce the regulations. But according to Iowa State Agriculture Secretary Patty Judge, neither Aventis nor government officials policed "starlink".

JEFFREY KAYE: Was any regulatory agency-- federal or state-- monitoring how the crops were produced and processed?

PATTY JUDGE: I am really going out on a limb by saying this, but in my opinion, no. Other than that, the corn was approved by EPA for planting and the tags were affixed to the bags that said it could not go into the food chain.

JEFFREY KAYE: The judge says Iowa, like other states, was not prepared for "starlink".

PATTY JUDGE: Iowa is not set up-- and this is a bigger issue that we know is facing us and something that we are trying to think about very hard here. We know that the future is going to be about biotechnology. We have got a glitch now, a problem that we are going to correct. Until we can have some system for grain segregation in the country, we need to be more careful than we were this time about planting before we have full approval because really we do not have very good ways right now of segregating grain.

JEFFREY KAYE: At the EPA in Washington, deputy administrator Stephen Johnson said officials believed the grain could be kept separate. Johnson called Aventis' failure to enforce the terms of the "starlink" registration outrageous and illegal. He says his agency is unlikely to give future approval for a gene-altered crop unless it is also deemed safe for human consumption.

STEPHEN JOHNSON: Clearly, a lesson learned here with the "starlink" situation is that clearly the company violated the law. Is additional oversight needed to ensure that someone didn't violate the law? Well, in this case, we needed to. But as I said earlier, I think the issue here of the split registration, given what's happened, and given the fact that Aventis, if you will, broke the law, it will be unlikely for us to ever approve split registration again.

JEFFREY KAYE: Second thoughts don't help elevator manager Gary Strube.

GARY STRUBE: I'm mad, yeah, but I'm not mad at our producers. If I'm mad at anyone, I'm mad at Aventis, how they could even market such a thing. The old corporate "sell it anyway" attitude. This thing could hurt a lot of people.

JEFFREY KAYE: Strube worries that even purchasers of "starlink" for animal feed will stop buying, fearing a lack of public confidence.

SEN. TIM HUTCHINSON: The fact that "starlink" corn has made its way into our food supply has prompted serious questions about how this may have happened.

JEFFREY KAYE: The "starlink" furor resulted in a congressional hearing as to what went wrong. The testing of millions of bushels of grain for "starlink" continues, not only by processors but by environmental groups in the US and abroad. The US Food and Drug Administration is also testing corn products, but officials won't discuss the scope of the investigation. The EPA has agreed to review an Aventis request that "starlink" be approved for human consumption. Aventis has suspended sales of the genetically modified corn seed.

CONVERSATION

RAY SUAREZ: Finally tonight, Elizabeth Farnsworth talks with one of the winners of this year's National Book Award.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: The award for young people's literature went to Gloria Whelan for her novel "Homeless Bird." It tells a contemporary story of a 13-year-old Indian girl's journey toward a new life after she is married and soon widowed. Gloria Whelan has written more than a dozen books for young readers. She also writes poetry and short stories for adults. She lives in the woods of northern Michigan. Congratulations.

GLORIA WHELAN: Thank you very much.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Please tell us the story of this girl who was married and widowed at age 13.

GLORIA WHELAN: Well, Coly at age 13 is told by her parents, because she's one more mouth to feed, it's time for an arranged marriage. She goes to the marriage, meets at the marriage itself for the first time the bridegroom whose name is Hary and she finds to her surprise that Hary is very young and very ill and that the and that the dowry was to take him to Beneres so that he can bathe in the Ganges and recover. And he does go to the Ganges but he does not recover and she's a widow and has to spend the rest of her life, it seems, with the kind of miserable mother-in-law being kind of a house slave. But then she finds a way to escape.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: And she escapes partly by learning to read. That's a very big part of the book and through her art. It seemed to me the story of a young woman learning that she's an artist. Did you mean it that way?

GLORIA WHELAN: I did. Actually I saw the story of these white saaried widows, thousands of white saaried widows in the city of Bernasi, and they're taken there by their in-laws, left there like so many abandoned kittens. They have to make their living by chanting in the temples for four hours a day and in return... They're fed by the monks. And I didn't want Coly, the girl that I was going to write about, this 13-year-old widow, to have to spend her life that way. A few days later, I happened to see an exhibit at Asia House, embroidery done by Indian women. And that gave me the idea for a way out for Coly.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: So these two things came together in your mind and produced the story. Is that how it usually happens?

GLORIA WHELAN: That's always how it happens. I have to have two things. One thing doesn't seem to do it. There have to be two things in juxtaposition and suddenly the story comes to life for me.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: It seemed to be very much - it was very lively. There was so much of India in it and yet you never went to India, did you?

GLORIA WHELAN: No, I didn't. It's really very exciting. I do a lot of writing about other times and other places and as you do your research and you begin writing the story, you get so immersed in those other places that you actually feel that you're there. So it's a kind of a magical way to time travel, to write these stories about distant places or other countries or other times.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Did you hesitate at all or was it risky for you to write about death for this age group. This is for the age group about 10 to 13, right?

GLORIA WHELAN: Yes, yes. Actually, the death comes very early in the book. You know almost immediately that it's going to happen. It's a very sad event, but it's a very small part of the actual story. And so the story goes on very quickly from there and what happens to Coly is really the story, and the death is just the beginning and not a major event in the story.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Would you read a little bit for us, please.

GLORIA WHELAN: Yes, I'd love to. Hary is the bridegroom who has died and sauce is the India word for mother-in-law. "In her sadness over Hary's death, Sauce grew bitter. Her angry words buzzed around me stinging like wasps. 'Your dowry did not save Hary and now we are burdened with one more mouth to feed,' she scolded. She made my name hateful to me all day long; she sent it screaming to the house across the courtyard. 'Coly, we need water. Coly, sweep the courtyard, the geese have soiled it. Coly, the clothes you washed are still dirty.' I did the best I could, thankful for a bed to sleep on and food to put in my mouth. Each morning I got up before the sun swallowed the darkness. It was so early that I felt as if I were the only one awake in the world. I made a respectful puga, bowing to go the household shrine. I washed at the courtyard well and brushed my teeth with a twig from the Neem Tree. I gathered dried leaves to light the dung in the stove so the water for the tea would be boiling when the family awoke. I hurried to the well for a pail of water. When you hold water in your hand, it weighs nothing. But put it in a pail and it is as heavy as a stone. I threw sticks at the bandicoot, at the nasty rat that lived under the house, to keep it from getting our food. If Sauce had let me creep quietly about my tasks, I would have been content. I still would have had a little place inside of me to go, a place I could wrap myself in like the cocoon a caterpillar makes. You can touch the cocoon, but you cannot touch the little thing inside unless you tear it apart. That is what my Sauce was doing to me: Worrying and badgering me with her never- ending orders and scoldings."

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: I love the image of the cocoon. I saw many images that seem to come partly from your life as a poet - the heron - the embroidery, itself. Do you think your poetry influences the way you write, this sort of novel?

GLORIA WHELAN: The poetry and then we live in the woods. The nearest house to us is a mile away. We live on a little lake. So the heron is something that I see out my window. The caterpillars I see when I'm out walking in the woods. So that really makes a difference in what I write about, too, although I'm writing about another place, those things are in my mind, and I know that those things exist in India and so I have that connection.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Ms. Whelan, why did you start writing young people's fiction?

GLORIA WHELAN: Well, we lived in northern Michigan, and we had gone there from the city of Detroit because we wanted the wilderness and the quiet. And we were there for, I think, two weeks and someone knocked on our door and... with a cowboy hat and boots and said they wanted to drill for oil on our property. We didn't have the mineral rights. So we couldn't say no so they bulldozed a road into our property and cleared three acres. We watched the derrick go up. We watched that process. I began to write about a young boy who worked for one of those oil wells. And that kind of got me started. It was an experience that I actually lived through.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Is the process quite different from the process you use when you write for adults either in your poetry or your stories?

GLORIA WHELAN: Not at all. It really isn't. The character... Might be younger, the story might be somewhat more simply told, but actually the process is exactly the same. You get it down. You revise. You think about it. You grope for something. You find it. You're surprised. It's the same process.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Will this award make a big difference in your writing or in your life?

GLORIA WHELAN: Well, I think it will make a big difference in this sense: It sort of sets a standard. It pushes me to try to do better. It's a kind of responsibility, and it's also a kind of affirmation. It makes me feel that somehow the stories that I'm writing are stories that are being received by somebody.

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: Well, Gloria Whelan, congratulations again and thank you very much.

GLORIA WHELAN: Thank you very much.

RECAP

RAY SUAREZ: Again, the major news story of this thanksgiving was the presidential recount. The Florida Supreme Court rejected Vice President Gore's request to order Miami-Dade County to resume its recount, and a spokesman said Gore will contest the county's certified results and had no plans to concede after the state's final certification. We'll see you on line and again here tomorrow evening with Shields and Gigot, among others. I'm Ray Suarez. Thanks and good night.