I Think I'm Dumb, or Maybe Just Happy
David Weigel | October 28, 2008, 10:24am
The
New York Times edit board is
suddenly very concerned with the North Carolina ballot, as 1) long ago, Dixiecrats exempted the presidential race from the button that lets you vote straight ticket and 2) Obama is narrowly ahead in the polls there.
This year, North Carolina’s flawed ballot could again result in tens of thousands of votes being lost. That is particularly worrisome since polls indicate a very close presidential race in the state. And as we saw in 2000, a presidential election can be decided by a mere 537 votes.
The problem isn't with North Carolina. The problem is democratic. Any majoritarian system is, by its nature, going to rely on the involvement of masses of dumb people who can't read or understand rules very well. Any ballot tweak meant to increase voter choices or simplify one part of the process is going to accidentally disenfranchise people who don't understand the rules. In 2000,
this literally cost Al Gore the presidency. Not old people misreading butterly ballots, that is. People who didn't get the rules.
The results of Duval County's vote left Democrats here shaking their heads. More than 26,000 ballots were invalidated, the vast majority because they contained votes for more than one presidential candidate. Nearly 9,000 of the votes were thrown out in the predominantly African-American communities around Jacksonville, where Mr. Gore scored 10-to-1 ratios of victory, according to an analysis of the vote by The New York Times.
... Local election officials attributed the outcome to a ballot that had the name of presidential candidates on two pages, which they said many voters found confusing. Many voters, they said, voted once on each page. The election officials said they would not use such a ballot in the future.
Rodney G. Gregory, a lawyer for the Democrats in Duval County, said the party shared the blame for the confusion. Mr. Gregory said Democratic Party workers instructed voters, many persuaded to go to the polls for the first time, to cast ballots in every race and "be sure to punch a hole on every page."
"The get-out-the vote folks messed it up," Mr. Gregory said ruefully.
They probably did, but there's only so much you can do with voters who think "if I want Bush to lose, I have to vote for Gore AND Monica Moorehead of the Workers Party." When an election law huckster like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. throws around facts like "black voters' ballots are disqualified at nine times the rate of white voters' ballots," this is the story behind them.
What can states do about it? As simple as you make a ballot (and "vote once for president then hit this button for the rest of the ticket" is not rocket science), you're going to have voters who can't grok it.
Emma | October 30, 2008, 1:00pm | #
Casting ballots correctly requires a minimum I.Q. and what that ceiling is depends on the design of the ballot.
The pseudononymous mathematician, La Griffe du Lion, looked at the 2000 Florida election and the (at least) 12 voting systems used throughout. Very interesting:
http://www.lagriffedulion.f2s.com/elec2000.htm
Here is a portion:
"The best voting system was 'L,' an optical scanning system from Global Election Systems, Inc. Adopted by 17 counties, it required only an IQ of about 60 to use correctly. Before PC, people with IQs of 60 were classified as morons. 'Mildly retarded' is now more acceptable. They are capable of acquiring reading and arithmetic skills to about sixth-grade level.
"The most difficult system was 'A,' from Sequoia Pacific System, Corporation. This punch-card system, adopted by 2 counties, required an IQ of about 75 to use. Though not qualifying for rocket science, 75 is enough to disqualify more than 25 percent of blacks and 5 percent of whites. Compare this to the Global Elections system which would stump only 3 percent of blacks and a negligible fraction of whites."
"Can you tell what the Florida outcome would have been if idiot-proof voting systems were used?" I asked.
"Indeed we can," said Mentor, retrieving another table to the screen.
"Look here," he said, "using cumulative data for all Florida, I computed the statewide IQ threshold to be -2.19 SD, and from this, calculated overall black and white error rates. Applying these to the turnouts, I found the number of uncounted ballots cast by each group.
Black
Turnout White
Turnout Error Rate
Black Error Rate
White Votes Not
Counted
Black Votes Not
Counted
White
STATEWIDE
TOTALS 893,000 Bl 5,246,000 Wht
11.73% Bl error
1.43% Wht error
105,000 Bl votes uncounted
75,000 Wht votes uncounted
"An 11.7 percent error rate for blacks caused 105,000 presidential votes to go uncounted. The white error rate of 1.4 percent resulted in a loss of 75,000 ballots.
"From exit polls we know that 57 percent of whites supported Bush, with 40 percent backing Gore. Only 7 percent of blacks supported Bush, 93 percent going for Gore. Applying these percentages to the uncounted ballots, we find that Gore lost 127,000 votes to voter error. Bush lost 50,000. Had there been no voter error, with all voters recording their true intent, Gore would have picked up a net of 77,000 votes, enough to defeat Bush handily in Florida, and award him the presidency."
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