Many People Too Ignorant to Vote, Report Finds

Many People Too Ignorant to Vote, Report Finds

NewsMax.com Wires
Tuesday, Jan. 30, 2001

ORLANDO, Fla. (UPI) – The inability to read was a problem for many voters in the election Nov. 7 and contributed to the vote-count fiasco, the Orlando Sentinel newspaper reported Monday.

The newspaper examined ballots in 15 counties and said the cause of many mistakes was illiteracy.

The newspaper said it found thousands of ballots on which people canceled their votes by improperly filling in the bubbles, voting for too many candidates, and failing to follow instructions. In some cases, ballots were left blank.

Pam Karlan, a law professor at Stanford University, said that when Congress banned illiteracy voting tests in 1975 many people assumed illiteracy no longer was a problem at the polls.

But she said Florida's vote-counting problems show that the issue remains. She said it was not a problem of race but rather of education.

"Voting is one place where it's difficult to get by without reading," said Karlan, who studies voting rights issues and recently wrote a book titled "When Elections Go Bad."

"Literacy is a big barrier to political participation," she said.

Tim Shanahan, a literacy expert at the University of Chicago, said some of the instructions and the ballots were confusing even to those who can read.

"Some of the things here are not problems that would throw someone with literacy problems," he said. "I could imagine a good reader would find this confusing."

In Gadsden County, a mostly black county on the Georgia border, one precinct had nearly a fourth of the ballots thrown out because voters didn't follow instructions.

Vivian Kelly, an 81-year-old retired schoolteacher and Democratic activist, said that in many cases the voters could not read the ballots.

"We had a lot of people register at the last minute this summer, but some of them just didn't know how to vote," she said. "There are little things that you have to tell people who don't read well."

The Sentinel said that although large numbers of black voters invalidated their ballots in Florida because they didn't follow directions, white voters also had problems understanding the ballot. In a Lake County precinct that is 99 percent white, 123 voters filled out their ballots incorrectly.

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