Richard Cohen had a few words to say on the subject this morning. I’ll quote you a chunk of the column, and then you can read the rest for yourself.
Cohen goes on to ask why it’s so anti-American not to bend over backward for our overseas military, but not for our old folks, who themselves might have served in World War II and other conflicts. “If a soldier can’t figure out he has to sign his name, no problem. But if a senior citizen got vertigo from that butterfly ballot, then it’s just too bad.”
It’s true! America has put such a value on youth and beauty, that we have forgotten the preciousness of our older folks. Many of them, as you’ve said, have served in the military, pulled themselves up from the bootstraps and generally worked (maybe) harder than we had to to get where they are at today.
I find it shameful that we have the attitude that our aged are “disposable” and that they have outlived their purpose. There is a lot of wisdom being lost when we ignore them and the things they can teach us. I know I’ve learned a lot from my grandparents and treasure the time I had and have with them.
Again, I believe it is our narrow-minded focus on the culture of youth. We need to be more like most Asian cultures that respect and revere their elderly.
I have believed exactly the same during this entire fiasco. I’m only 42 but I can’t see well up close anymore. There is a big difference between a bingo sheet and those little tiny holes on a punch ballot or a scan ballot. I voted in relative peace and quiet. But I had to really look at that ballot to make sure I was doing it right. In addition to the “bubble” that you marked there were alternating black and empty bubble dots running down each side of the entire page. It could have been confusing. There were no long lines. No hustle and bustle like there are at many of the polls across the country. Parking was right in front of the door.
I wish I still had my precious grandparents. It saddens me to hear so many idiots speak about our elderly like they no longer count. It drives me crazy that people seem so willing to equate poor eyesight, impaired hearing, and stiff old bones with idiocy. It must be hard sometimes to have a good mind trapped in an deteriorating body. (Hell it is hard!) I see people all the time being rude and impatient with the elderly, in check out lines, in traffic, and at restaraunts. These people are nothing more than insensitive and rude, poorly raised, as my Nanny would have said.
Most of the people making these kind of comments aren’t spring chicken themselves. They too will one day reach their golden years. Hell they’re already on their way! Wonder if they will remember how inhumanely they treated others when they were younger.
This problem afflicts those of us in the north as well so perhaps it our nearly homogenous American / Canadian culture that propagates this attitude.
The elderly have no value to society; they don’t work but rather collect pension benefits that far outweigh what they may have contributed in their working lives.
They will continue to put a strain on our healthcare systems and this will become more and more serious as the average age of our respective populations increases.
They pose a hazard when they continue to drive their vehicles on public roadways.
They slow us down everywhere they go, don’t you just hate getting behind one of those penny counting grannies at the market?
Quite simply, they’re an inconvenience aren’t they?
Before some of you warm up the flamethrower please realize that this commentary is somewhat sarcastic but reflective of what many people think about our elderly.
I believe that the elders within our culture deserve the highest reverence and respect, we are here because of their lifetimes of hard work and innovation. Four of these elderly people were my grandparents and two are my parents. Without these six I would not have become one.
Each of us has a debt to at least six people who have went before, my six are not your six but I will treat yours with respect. I have only one of my six left (my mom) and god pity the fool who treats her poorly…
Well put. The amount and venom of the rhetoric is deafening (from both sides), but this one is one that I find especially aggrivating.
Where does critical thinking come into play? I know we each want ‘our guy’ to win, but, geez. when the one side “this county should be allowed to re-vote” I said “nah… doesn’t sound right to me”. and when the other side said “hand counting is unreliable” I also said “nah…doesn’t sound right to me”.
And in this case, where each side has froth at the mouth saying in essence “but you HAVE to count these votes since it was an honest mistake by the voter, but not the other one’s votes since they shoulda known…” you have to wonder.
And the t-shirts that were worn about “My grandma knows who she voted for, how about yours” I found to be especially distasteful (especially considering how much pandering both parties did for the senior vote before the election).
I agree with the sentiment, but disagree with your application of it to this scenario. Ridiculing geezers was not invented by partisans in this dispute, but is instead a well entrenched part of American culture. This is very unfortunate, IMHO, but what is happening today is not a departure from standard cultural norms.(See a discussion of it and related matters in this thread.) I would question those who trot this out only for this particular dispute. And BTW, what do you think of all the Strom Thurmond succession jokes? And how funny were all the Reagan jokes?
Regarding the comparison to military ballots, the difference is obvious, and has been pointed out before. In the case of the military ballots, they were not an “honest mistake by the voter” as wring suggested, but were, instead, an honest mistake by someone other than the voter. The military people who lost their votes due to postmarks were denied their vote due to actions of people other than themselves. The old folks lost their’s due completely to their own actions, unfortunate as this may be.
I’ll try to dig up a link, but I recall an article indicating that the most glaringly apparent “discrepancies” (double punched ballots, etc.) were from predominantly black or hispanic precincts. Yet, I continue to hear folk mock the elderly, without pursuing alternative possible target. Yes, it seems it is more acceptable to ridicule the elderly than other groups.
I have a hard time, however, in agreeing that the individuals who voted incorrectly bore no responsibility – that it was entirely the fault of a poorly designed ballot. What word(s) would you propose to describe the plight/performance of the individuals who had difficulty correctly registering their vote? The best I have been able to come up with is “incompetent.” And what accomodations should be made for what difficulties any conceivable group may have?
Izzy, gee, flattered by your attention, but if it’s all the same to you, can you keep your quarrels with me in the thread devoted to it, instead of diverting this one? Just a suggestion.
The problem is whether the notion of ‘individual responsibility’ is applicable to large groups. If I were a Palm Beach voter, you could in good conscience say to me, “RT, you should make sure you punch the right hole; if you don’t, it’s your problem.” And you can expect it to have an effect, if said in advance. But try telling that to 285,000 people in Palm Beach County; it just doesn’t work.
People in groups will do what they do, and will respond in predictable ways to forces acting on them, whether it’s a change in the economy, or a skewed ballot. This isn’t a news flash; Asimov wrote his most famous work, the Foundation trilogy, around this concept approximately an eon ago. Where individual responsibility fits in to the expectations we have for the behavior of large numbers of people is a tough question, but expecting individual responsibility to counteract forces acting on the group without substantial prompting at the very least, is spitting into the wind.
[sarcasm] Well, let’s see, the ‘incompetents’ included soldiers who were too dumb to sign their ballots, or get a witness when they did. They should all be kicked out of the military as incompetents, and given a general discharge so people who might hire them will know what to expect. [/sarcasm]
No, seriously, I’d describe them as ‘human’. I’ve cited elsewhere my occasional tendency to walk into the office next door, thinking it’s my own. Golly bum, how could I be so dumb? My name’s on my door; the other guy’s name is on his. But occasionally I’m walking down the hall thinking about what I’m working on, and not about going through the right door, even though that’s a necessary part of doing my job.
It’s just that the consequences of walking through the wrong door are a brief “D’oh!”, followed by backing out and going through the right door, rather than voting for the wrong guy and not being able to take it back.
My building, that is to say, is designed in a way that is forgiving to such casual mistakes. Going through the unintended door isn’t irrevocable. Why should ballots be any different?
Or when I add and drop players in my fantasy football league: I get a computer message saying, “You are adding Jeff Graham and dropping Jerry Rice. If you want to go through with this transaction, click ‘OK’.” The very fact that I’m doing this on a computer indicates that I’m probably more intelligent than much of the population, yet they have this handy fail-safe for a completely meaningless transaction. Why can’t voting be like this? You could enter your intended votes into a computer, and the computer could laser-print the bubbles on a ballot to be fed into an optical character reader.
In short, our world is full of machines, procedures, and so forth, that are designed to be robust in the face of human fallibility. Why should voting not be one of these?
But you could easily reverse the argument. It’s not that the consequences are minor because you don’t pay attention to what door you go through- it’s that you don’t pay attention to what door you go through because the consequences are minor. If the office next to yours was filled with man-eating badgers waiting to escape, I’d expect that you’d pay a lot more attention to which door you were about to go through.
Great! You got the millions of dollars needed to upgrade current voting technology? If so, donate it! If not, convince local legislators that it’s worth spending the money to upgrade the systems! Prior to this election, I think you’d have had a seriously uphill battle- compared to some of the other things tax money is spent upon, moving voting standards from “good enough for government work” to “blindingly exact” was an extremely low priority. I expect that things will change now.
Because you can approach the situation from one of two directions:
Humans are falliable, and will make stupid mistakes, so let’s make the system as fail-proof as possible
OR
Voting is an extremely important duty, therefore those who approach it should do so with all of the time and care necessary.
Personally, I stand very much behind the latter. Making a simple mistake is easy. But so is double-checking your work. Voting is a very important duty; I don’t see that making it easier to simply dash off a vote without much thought is somehow a better process than a system where those who make careless mistakes or uninformed errors lose their say. And I hold that true both for the double-punched ballots of Florida and those military personel who didn’t get a witness to sign and address their ballot.
As I understood it, anyway, the ballot itself was voted on prior to the election. I guess everyone missed that part (or, I have misunderstood–besides, I heard it on the news). What interests me is that anyone thinks the ballots should be counted for any reason, regardless of poor eyesight etc. What, no one can ask for help? If I fail to understand an issue, instruction, etc, I quickly clear up that misunderstanding. In something as “important” (I use the term loosely) as voting for a pres, I would hope that people take it seriously enough to ensure they get it right.
Of course, if you’re paranoid AND you don’t understand the ballot, well, I guess that’s a handicap the Disabilities Act never quite made it around to covering. Damn them.
Problem is, in many situations, they didn’t just lose their say. Their say went to an entirely different person. That, to me, is worse (or can be worse, anyway) than not having my vote counted at all.
Most people don’t go to the voting booths without having decided who to vote for, I’d imagine. And since voting in this country occurs on a Tuesday, a lot of these folks are in a hurry. Why make them solve the equivalent of a brain teaser puzzle just to vote? One would assume that the majority of the thought should occur before the vote is ever placed.
I didn’t see anyone actually ridiculing the old people, just ones that had memory and eyesight good enough that they can remember which hole they punch days later but cannot see it on the day of the voting?
But then, most people don’t have problems with the ballot.
And some people definitely don’t go into the voting booth with any idea. How else do you get 4-5% “undecided” the day before the election? Why else do studies show that candidates listed earlier in the ballot tend to do overwhelmingly better than candidates lower on the ballot (a study in the late '80’s showed that candidates whose names began in the first third of the alphabet- and thus were listed early on the ballot- were three times more represented in local government than name demographics normally would account for).
But again, a majority of people don’t have problems with the ballots. My feeling is that the people whose votes were not counted are disproportionately those who weren’t mindful of what they were doing anyways. And I’m an elitist bastard who doesn’t think that those people who can’t be bothered to study the issues and the candidates should be cried over when they screw up their ballot. There were people there to help voters correctly fill out their ballots. The only evidence we have that these officials didn’t help those who had trouble is anecdotal and unsubstantiated (have we actually seen more than one complaint about a specific official or station?).
Now, were it to be proven to me that officials didn’t help those who had trouble with their ballots (and such proof would be a preponderance of charges against specific officials or at specific stations; again, I have yet to hear more than four people levy this charge, and all of them regarding different stations and officials), then I would feel that their rights had been denied. But until then, I will maintain that these people lost their rights because they did not adequately live up to the responsibility that those rights require.
The problem is, the ‘thought’ involved should have to do with deciding who to vote for. Putting care into lining up arrows and holes has nothing to do with taking care in choosing the ‘right’ candidate.
John, we agree that voting is a very important duty. But I see no connection between that and testing on totally unrelated motor skills.
Besides, if you want some sort of bar or hurdle for voters to jump over to demonstrate their commitment to the democratic process or some other such ideal, then you and any like-minded citizens should most certainly try to write that into the law, and we can then debate it openly. But back-door ‘requirements’ like this are fundamentally dishonest.
Besides, as I’ve already argued at length on my Survey Response Error thread, this requirement was imposed on Gore voters but not on Bush voters. Even if a backdoor requirement to concentrate and be coordinated is instituted, it should apply equally to voters, regardless of what candidate they support. This one didn’t. And even a trivial requirement imposed on one side but not the other will rob that side of votes.
Actually, Drain, the official in charge of this county did put a lot of thought into it. As you know, she was a democrat, so I don’t think her intent was to confuse the Gore supporters into voting for Buchanan. She chose the butterfly ballot because by spreading the names over two pages, she could make the font much bigger than if they were limited to one page. And since she knew a lot of voters in her county were elderly, she wanted the names to be as big as possible. Ironically, she was trying to be proactive and responsive to the voters’ needs in her district.
I’ve seen the ballot, as have you, and I can see how it could be a bit confusing. But a brain teaser? I think that’s an exaggeration.
