 |
Fade to
Black presents |
|
|
On Tuesday November 7th, 2000 millions of giddy and excited Americans patriotically shuffled to the voting booths to cast their votes for the next President of the United States. Overnight, it became clear we had a close race on our hands between the Presidential hopefuls Al Gore and George W. Bush. So close in fact, that it all comes down to the state of Florida -- the winner of this state becomes our next President. Late in the day of November 8th, George W. Bush pulled away with a significant lead and will most likely go on to win. But wait! It was around this time a number of Al Gore supporters in Palm Beach, Florida stepped dutifully forward to say they were "confused" by the ballots and began demanding they be allowed to recast their votes. Always pursuing both sides of the story, we got ourselves a copy of the Official Ballot of Florida, the one you see below:
Although it appears rather obvious, even with this low quality reproduction, one only needs to follow the arrow next to the candidate of your choice and punch a hole to cast your vote. Apparently, many Floridians were terribly baffled by these simple instructions. Shortly after the news broke, many Democrats, including Jesse Jackson (who seems always available for comment) came down to raise "awareness" of this grave injustice. By Thursday, November 9th, lawsuits against the ballot started filing into the courts asking for an official "do over". At the time of this article, we sit and wait for the recount and for the courts to hear the case of the "baffling ballot". In the meantime, we decided to take matters in our own hands. We are simply not sure if we're missing something here, so we decided to conduct our own test. We asked a small group of children, too young to officially take part in the Nation's election, to cast their votes using the same Official Ballot the people in Palm Beach used, and sought to find out how they handled themselves. The Test The test was rather straightforward. We showed each child the ballot and explained to them the instructions and asked them to find the right candidate and mark appropriate circle. To make the test a bit more strenuous and to simulate as close as possible the actual voting experience, we told each child as they were presented with the ballot to cast their vote for Al Gore. This seemed to be the hurdle that many of the people from Florida had difficulty with.
|
||
