Yes you can count the number of letters in the grid, but it's normal in most puzzles in other newspapers to have the solution lengths after the clue.

This is important with multi-word answers because 14 spaces could be a 14-letter word, or a single letter followed by 13, or 2 letters followed by 12 and so on. In cryptics (which this isn't, really), knowing the letter distribution in multi word answers is essential to it being a pleasant and fun puzzle in my experience.

That would have prevented this trick working, because you would have to give the length as (7, 7) for "CLINTON ELECTED" or (3, 4, 7) for "BOB DOLE ELECTED" depending on the "right" answer.

Omitting the lengths allowed this little game to work. It would not have, otherwise.