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Frankfurter Professor of Law Alan M. Dershowitz was one of thirty lawyers who appeared in federal court before Middlebrooks this morning. Dershowitz represented a group of Palm Beach voters...
...nation could have been spared a lot of whining and litigation, it seems, if only certain confused Palm Beach County supporters of Vice President Al Gore '69--supporters who voted for Pat Buchanan--had let fourth-graders vote in their stead. At issue is the infamous "butterfly ballot." It has been plastered across numerous web sites; check it out if you haven't yet, if only to see what folks in America are getting confused about these days...
...pity these courts will not be able to consider a recent experiment conducted by school psychologist Ron McGee. According to Fox News, McGee asked a group of fourth graders in Atlanta, Georgia, to vote for their favorite cartoon character with a ballot identical to the one used in Palm Beach. Actually, the ballot McGee used was a tad harder than its Palm Beach analogue. The two columns for best cartoon candidate got squeezed onto one page, not two, and they weren't separated by any sort of neat central punch space. But don't tell that to the dazed...
Perhaps the group of fourth-graders was marred by "sample bias," having been selected from an unrepresentatively precocious pool of future rocket scientists and philosophers. The more likely explanation, however, is that the Palm Beach ballot is so ridiculously easy to understand that anyone who finds it confusing might render a greater service to the republic by simply staying home and not voting...
...serious civic responsibility, and we should take care to maintain it vigorously as such. There is no entitlement to be automatically heard, and there is certainly no right to have one's civic carelessness subsidized by others. So next time they vote, the folks who were "confused" in Palm Beach might actually consider slowing down and rereading the instructions. Barring such onerous measures, there is always the fourth grade...