Ratifying a Winner in the Phone Vote

For more than 18 months the campaign has raged amid a blizzard of contending hype, hoopla and hard sell. Tons of campaign literature have been mailed, endless hours of television commercials broadcast, hundreds of millions of dollars of campaign funds spent. Accusations of lying, ballot stealing and electoral tampering have abounded. But already last week, well before the Sept. 1 deadline when the vast majority of some 95 million eligible telephone subscribers are to choose a supplier of long-distance telephone services, the outcome of the Great Long-Distance Telephone Election was already clear. The most elaborate competitive exercise in U.S. regulatory history...