Slate inadvertently points towards a likely ACLU tactic for taking the Recall to court in Wanted: A Legible Voting Ballot.
A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters' confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old punch-card machines to optical-scan systems or on implementing electronic voting. They have dismissed or ignored the butterfly layout's problematic design as an aberrationï¿‘a stupid mistake on the part of local officials.
Seems to me that any lawyer with a thirst to throw the Recall into the courts could just find a willing judge to agree with him that people are just too stupid to figure out an "illegible" ballot design.
ACLU: "Your honor, surely you can see that this design can only confuse and baffle voters with IQs less than room temperature. How can democracy be said to be fair if we haven't got 1,000 unemployed web designers throwing up 10,000 proposed designs for ballots before any election is allowed to take place. This design is a blot on democracy and may well cause the Democratic Party to lose!"
JUDGE DOH:"To lose! My God man you're right! Can't have that. This election is hereby placed in escrow until further notice!"
Why not? Isn't it clear by now that defeating the will of the people is only a matter of finding the right judge? After all, the ACLU were able to find three judges last month to agree with them that minority voters were too stupid to figure out punch-card ballots.
Now the argument will be that voters are too stupid to correctly because the ballot wasn't well-designed. Hey, somebody has got to protect voters who have managed to register while being utterly illiterate. Why not the ACLU?
Posted by Van der Leun at October 7, 2003 10:24 AM