Bartcop;

You've probably heard some version or other of the following from some
ditto-monkey or other:

"If those people in Palm Beach were too dumb to know who they were voting
for, tough luck! Why should we cater to stupid people?"

Laura Ingraham of the Scaifettes said something similar recently on TV.  Now
I'm not proposing to settle whether there should be a revote in Palm Beach
-- there are actually good arguments on both sides there.  But I believe I
can prove to a near-mathematical certainty that Laura Ingraham, or anybody
who casually makes this kind of statement, is literally so stupid she
doesn¹t even know how stupid she is.

Consider how many forms you have filled out in, say, the last year.  It has
to be in the neighborhood of a hundred, doesn¹t it?  Most of them were of a
very routine and straightforward type, essentially unambiguous in their instructions.

Now ask yourself how many of them you got right.  All one hundred?
I don't believe you.  Ninety-nine?  You¹re truly exceptional!
Only once, in all these cases, did you catch yourself saying  "Damn, they asked me
for my birthdate and I put down today¹s date instead?"

Of course, if you caught yourself only once, you probably made similar errors
three or four times without noticing.

So let's say the average person will botch a very simple form three percent of the time.
The infamous butterly ballot is at least as likely to create errors as the typical,
day-to-day form, don't you think?  Or maybe just a little more so, because, even if it
does have those arrows, it isn¹t what you¹re used to, and the hole for Buchanan does
seem to line up with the word "Democrat," and if your mind is a little preoccupied....

But let's say the average person will get a form like that wrong three percent of the time.
Not a stupid person--an average person.  What do we expect to happen when a hundred
thousand average people use that form?  How many people would we expect to get the form wrong?

The answer is about three thousand: three percent of a hundred thousand.
By remarkable coincidence, that's roughly the number of people who apparently
blundered into a Buchanan vote when they intended to vote for Gore.

There is simply no reason to attribute this result to exceptional stupidity on the part of those voters,
unless you are also willing to call people exceptionally stupid when, about one time in thirty,
they put down today's date when the form calls for their birthdate.

Of course Laura Ingraham is too smart ever to do something like that, isn't she?
Let¹s give her a chance to prove it!

MSNBC, just provide us with the last one hundred forms she has personally filled out,
and I'm sure she'll agree that if we can find three or more in which some instruction was
botched, she'll gladly wear the dunce cap for the rest of her life.  Of course she'll have to give up
her current job: for if dumb people don't deserve a chance to correct their vote, they most certainly
don't deserve a highly-paid position delivering dumb and snotty comments on national TV.
 

Jeff Kramer