Remember how, during the Bush-Gore controversy in Florida, it became clear that the largest, poorest, and most urban counties in the country tend to use "antiquated" punch-card balloting machines, rather than the improved and expensive electronic voting systems developed only in recent years? Disproportionate numbers of African Americans live in such counties, of course. And so it is their votes, more than anyone else's, that are most likely to be overlooked through technological error on election night. Never mind, for the moment, what implications for law and justice this fact might have. Recall only how routinely it was bandied about by the Gore campaign, how universally it was accepted by the news media, and how -- fess up, now -- even you believed it was true.
Nope. Two researchers, Stephen Knack of the University of Maryland and Martha Kropf of the University of Missouri-Kansas City, have just completed a systematic, nationwide analysis and cross-tabulation of county-level data on demographics and voting equipment. Their surprising conclusion: "We find little support for the view that resource constraints cause poorer counties with large minority populations to retain antiquated or inferior voting equipment. In most states, it is whites, the non-poor, and Republican voters who are more likely to reside in punch-card counties rather than African Americans, the poor, and Democratic voters. Moreover, counties with punch-card systems tend to have higher incomes, higher tax revenues, and larger populations than do counties with modern voting equipment."
Once Knack and Kropf's impressively detailed study ("Who Uses Inferior Voting Technology?") becomes more widely known, THE SCRAPBOOK predicts that Democratic party support for a national solution to the punch-card "problem" will shrink to nothing.