Word: palmes
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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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...
...then, the crown jewel of the voting fiasco, the ineptly designed Palm Beach "butterfly" ballot, a ballot that caused thousands of primarily minority voters to wail that they may have given their precious vote to (gasp!) Pat Buchanan. Even Pat "The Nazi" Buchanan admits that these votes were not for him (probably out of some sort of desire to keep all of his votes "ethnically pure"), but we need not just take his word for it. Statisticians put the probability that fewer than 1743 (the margin between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and Gore before this first recount...
...potential way to ensure the will of the people is to engineer a voting system where voters can check the validity of their ballots themselves. Simply put, ballots need to be easy to read and easy to check for errors (two simple and very basic requirements lacking in the Palm Beach ballot, as well as in ballots around the country). It tells you a little something about the efficiency and effectiveness of the government compared to the private sector when we get more confirmation that our will has been recorded purchasing a book from Amazon.com than we do voting...
...watching world, America's malaise resides not simply in the fact that the U.S. can't seem to agree on just how many recounts of the Palm Beach vote doth a president make. The leadership crisis of which it may be a symptom has been in the making since the end of the Cold War. Partisanship ended at the shoreline back when Americans saw themselves as threatened by an "Evil Empire," and it's almost unthinkable that the elected representatives of either party would have tolerated a spectacle as demeaning as last year's impeachment proceedings in an era when...