Proofiness - Charles Seife [125]
62
Looking at the ratio of voters per electoral college vote as a crude measure of the worth of a vote, a vote in the District of Columbia in the 2000 presidential election was twice as powerful as a vote in California. This means, pretty obviously, that the votes aren’t worth the same amount.
63
The majority judges recognized how damaging their equal protection argument was. They wanted to elect Bush, but not suffer the consequences of the logic that they used, so they slipped a little clause into their ruling that was intended to prevent it from ever being used as a precedent. “Our consideration is limited to the present circumstances, for the problem of equal protection in election processes generally presents many complexities.” This was unprecedented; never before had the Supreme Court tried to evade the consequences of its rulings. In trying to get a freebie, one-time-only decision, the Court created legal chaos. (“Respectfully, the Supreme Court does not issue non-precedential decisions,” decreed a lower court a few years later. You know things are in disarray when lower courts are dinging the Supreme Court rather than vice versa.) Merely trying to cite Bush v. Gore leads to a logical paradox—how can you make an argument that uses Bush v. Gore if the very act of citing it means that you disagree with it? (Of course, this doesn’t stop lawyers from trying!)
64
What’s more, the vast majority of the big mismatches—discrepancies of more than a vote or two—were in pro-Franken Ramsey County. As mentioned earlier, a pack of raccoons was apparently in charge of keeping Ramsey County’s voter turnout records; they were demonstrably and obviously kept incorrectly. The discrepancy was because the voter turnout records were unreliable, not because ballots were magically materializing out of thin air (or being double-counted).
65
“Heretofore unnoticed” if you’ve been living on Mars, that is.
66
This is what they did in Bush v. Gore; a number of newspapers spent oodles of money and time counting and recounting ballots in various ways. Their conclusion: Gore won . . . or Bush won, depending on how you count.
67
As do innumerable other voting methods that election reformers like to talk about, such as Condorcet voting, approval voting . . . the list goes on and on. In my view, plurality voting is the best system because its ballots are simplest and therefore minimize voter error.
68
Confusingly, the Voting Rights Act had been interpreted as encouraging racial gerrymandering to give underrepresented minorities more power. However, Supreme Court cases in 1993 and 1995 functionally put an end to the practice.
69
In the 1990s, Texas Republicans packed Democratic districts in a way that made a small number of African-American Democratic congressmen displace a larger number of white Democratic ones, so the gain for the African Americans was a loss for the Democratic Party. It was a fiendishly clever plan that its inventors dubbed “Project Ratfuck.”
70
Gerrymandering has a solution. Mathematicians have ways of spotting politically mandated gerrymandering, so it’s possible to set standards. And some states have external, nonpartisan committees that are in charge of redrawing boundaries in response to changing populations.
71
These sorts of clauses tended to exempt a person from the poll tax if he could prove that his grandfather had the right to vote—which white folk usually could and African Americans could not. Nowadays, shorn of its original racist heritage, a grandfather clause only refers to an exemption from a new law based upon prior circumstances.
72
Interestingly, the “poll” in “poll tax” didn’t specifically refer to voting, even though functionally it was a tax on going to the polls. The term comes from Middle English—polle meant “head,” so a poll tax was in fact a tax put on each person’s head (also known as a “capitation”). A polling place, on the other hand, is a place where your head is counted, so there’s a shared etymology. Nevertheless, it’s something of a coincidence that poll