Too Dumb to Vote: And too smart, as well - disputed Florida election results
John Derbyshire
findarticles.com
One of the questions left hanging during the Florida vote-count fiasco was: When the Gore people asked for manual recounts in three of their counties, why didn't the Bush people do the same in three of theirs? I am pretty sure I know the answer: The Bush people did not request recounts because they believed that any manual recount in any county would unearth extra Gore votes, since Republican voters do not spoil their ballots-not, at any rate, as often as Democrats do.
In defense of this thesis-the thesis, I mean, that this is what the Bush people believed-I offer the following piece of circumstantial evidence: the silence of the Bushies. By offering no public answer to a question so much asked, the governor's aides left the impression that they were outmaneuvered by the opposition-that they were, indeed, the Stupid Party. This, I think, was calculated to be the lesser of two evils. For Republicans to have said out loud that they believed the spoiling of ballots to be a mainly Democratic failing would have been translated as: "GOP thinks Democrats are too dumb to vote." And that, in turn, would quickly have been spun by the Democrats into: "GOP thinks African-Americans are too dumb to vote." The Bush camp would rather be thought slow-witted than get stuck with that headline.
But is it true, what these campaign operatives seem to believe? Is a Democratic voter more likely than a Republican to spoil his ballot? A New York Times report about rejected ballots in Florida's Duval County is suggestive, though you have to read between the lines. Duval's ballot spread the names of presidential candidates over two pages. Large numbers of Democratic voters seemed to think, or to have been told, that they had to mark a candidate on each page. They therefore wound up voting for more than one presidential candidate, thus invalidating their ballots. Says the Times:
The double-marked ballots substantially affected Mr. Gore's showing. . . . More than 20 per cent of the votes cast in predominantly African-American precincts were tossed out, nearly triple the majority white precincts. In two largely African-American precincts, nearly one-third of the ballots were invalidated.
What seems to have happened is that Democratic precinct workers had energetically registered, then transported to the polls, voters from wherever they could find them, without any regard to whether these voters had any interest in, or understanding of, the contest, or any familiarity with voting procedures. Yes, some Democrats are too dumb to vote. So are some Republicans. But people that dumb generally stay home on Election Day, joining the 50 percent of Americans who do not bother to vote. If you pressure them into the voting booth, they will bungle the process. Perhaps it is not the dumbness that is so peculiarly Democratic as the pressuring.
If we admit that there is a problem of citizens "too dumb to vote," the obvious solution would be some restriction on the right to vote based on competency. There is nothing intrinsically shocking about this. Many of our constitutional rights can be exercised only after someone in authority has judged our fitness to exercise them. In my own state of New York, for instance, the right to own a handgun depends on your having passed through a lengthy process of inquiry into your character and habits, carried out by the local police. In the case of voting rights, however, this whole area of discussion is blocked out by the dark shadow of literacy tests.
Literacy tests for voters were once widespread. They were used in some parts of New York State, for example, until 1970. In the Jim Crow South, however, they were much abused to prevent black citizens from voting. Literacy tests were sometimes waived altogether for illiterate whites, while a black voter might have been asked to construe a page of Chaucer. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 effectively put an end to these abuses. It did not explicitly outlaw literacy tests; it only made them subject to federal scrutiny. But the bad publicity generated by all the unfair practices drove literacy tests out of fashion.
This is a shame, because the case for absolutely universal adult suffrage is not a strong one. For example, the poll tax-charging people to vote-seems no more unreasonable than the fee I pay for my pistol license, though the phrase "poll tax" is in the same kind of odium as "literacy test," and for similar reasons.
Given the restraints imposed by our Constitution, and the sensibilities of our age, I doubt whether this sort of limit on the right to vote could be adopted today. Still, I should like to make a modest proposal for a form of voting restriction that I believe might pass muster with the broad American public, given a decade or two of explication.
First, let me note that as well as being too dumb to vote, you can also be too smart to vote. People of very high intelligence are especially susceptible to large abstract theories about society. They live lives, and think thoughts, that put a wide gulf between themselves and the generality of citizens. Carry out the following thought experiment: Suppose that in, say, 1930 the U.S. franchise had been limited to citizens holding a Ph.D. What would the consequences have been? Is there any doubt that we should have had a Soviet America in very short order, and that we should right now be digging ourselves out of the same pit the poor Russians find themselves in?
It seems to me, in fact, that political stupidity is a special kind of stupidity, not well correlated with other kinds. At the very highest levels of intelligence, the correlation may actually be inverse: The more brilliant you are, the dumber your politics. Albert Einstein seems to have thought well of Stalin; and remember the kooky political programs that issued forth from Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and other 20th-century luminaries.
Up to a point, education makes you more conservative. The 5 percent of the electorate who did not graduate from high school went for Al Gore, by a 59-39 percent margin; the 24 percent who graduated from college went 51-45 for Bush. Higher up, however, this trend reverses: An acquaintance who teaches math at a prominent university reported that among his colleagues it is "damn near impossible to find anyone who doesn't puke at the prospect of a Dubya regime."
In the matter of intelligence, then, the American electorate follows the ancient pattern of "bottom and top against the middle." The petty gentry, who were the lowest class of voters in preindustrial England, allied themselves with crown and church against the Whig aristocracy and the mercantile entrepreneurs of the cities. Today, the bottom layer of American society looks to the Clintonoid New Class elites to protect those government programs without which, both have come to believe, the poor would be driven to desperation.
The New Class responds in an appropriately paternalistic fashion. Asked in the last week of October if he would be taking a preelection break, President Clinton replied: "I'll stay here to Election Day, if I have to, to do right by the American people, because my first job is to take care of them." This is not very far removed from the response of the late Chinese premier, Chou En-lai, when an interviewer asked him whether he regretted having had no children: "All the people of China are my children." To most Republicans, of course, the occupant of the White House is an elected official temporarily in charge of one of the three branches of our government. But to large numbers of Democrats, including apparently the current occupant himself, he is what the Russian tsar used to be styled: "Little Father of the people."
We have a voter-intelligence problem, therefore, at both ends of the bell curve. The solution seems plain: IQ-test everyone who registers to vote, then remove both tails of the bell curve from the electoral rolls. Those too dimwitted to cope with a multi-page ballot ought not have the vote; neither ought those who believe their own brilliance gives them a license to organize the lives of the rest of us.
If we chopped off at two standard deviations from the mean, we should have disenfranchised 4 percent of the adult population-about 8 million people. If that seems too many, we could take the cutoff points to three standard deviations in each direction, depriving only 0.2 percent of the electorate-about 400,000 people. Assuming that these extremes of the IQ distribution all voted Democratic, that would be enough to reverse Al Gore's margin in the popular vote. The Stupid Party we may be, but there's no reason for our electoral successes to be at the mercy of stupid voters.
COPYRIGHT 2000 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group
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