Wednesday, 31 December 2003

Clark, Race and Voting

Steven Taylor of PoliBlog gets to the bottom of the whole Clark/disenfranchisement discussion. Suffice it to say I agree with Taylor’s policy prescriptions; however, I will say that the use of outdated voting technology in poorer counties seems to be more the result of those counties being poor—and thus devoting their limited resources to things that were perceived as more important than voting machines (like economic development, law enforcement, and public education), at least in the minds of most prior to the 2000 ballot controversy—rather than any deliberate action to systematically disenfranchise voters. Outside a very small number of academics, virtually nobody even knew, much less cared, that punch-card ballots had higher error rates than other voting methods until it became an issue in Florida.