Word: voter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Noble responds that her freshness on the city's political scene gives her an advantage. "The way Cambridge folks attack one another, I consider it an asset to be above the fray," she says. "The wrath of the voter that ushered in [Gov. William F. Weld '66] is still very much alive in Cambridge...
...place in which to serve time rather than to learn. The results are grimly apparent: clerks at fast-food restaurants who need computerized cash registers to show them how to make change; Americans who can drive but cannot read the road signs; a democracy in which an informed voter is a statistical oddity...
...Awadi understands that stability is unlikely if hereditary rulers resist legitimate pressures for change. "The trick now is not so difficult," he says. "We must make the regime more responsive and understanding, goals that would certainly be helped by increasing the voter rolls." And for whom would the newly enfranchised be most likely to vote? "Well," says al-Awadi, smiling, "I am not the most astute of politicians, but it would seem to me that those granted a certain right might well feel a strong preference for whoever is seen as having given it to them...
...double their seats in Congress, from 10 to 19, and add scores of Latinos to legislatures and city councils. California, Texas and Florida, where Latino population gains have been largest over the past decade, hold the most potential for Hispanic political gains. Says Andy Hernandez, president of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project: "Redistricting is the best chance for Hispanics to protect their rights, participate in government and make democracy work for them...
Fishkin begins with a telling critique of political polling, the main tool that the candidates and their handlers use to divine the will of the voters. As he argues in his forthcoming book, Democracy and Deliberation (Yale University Press; $17.95), "On many issues, about four out of five citizens do not have stable . . . opinions; they have what the political psychologists call 'non-attitudes' or 'pseudo-opinions.' " Fishkin's point is that traditional sampling does not allow those polled to discuss the issues, nor do the polltakers provide more than cursory information. The result, all too often, is a statistically impeccable...