[Congressman Billybob]

My article would have been the same, even if I'd said nothing about total turnout. Laundry-list and difficult ballots have been researched to a fare-thee-well by people with way too much time on their hands (like my coilleagues in the Ph.D. program at American University).

The bottom line is absolutely established from long, hard, clear examples. The more complicated the ballot is, the less voters will be able to cast their votes successfully in accord with their intentions going into the voting booth. In fact, that's a general truth of human nature -- the harder it is to do anything, the fewer people will succeed in doing it.

The only reason we are not going to see months of litigation by lawyers in $1,000 suits with an ax to grind, after this election, on behalf of allegedly "disenfranchised" voters, is this: Gray Davis will be overwhelmingly recalled. Arnold Schwarzenegger will be overwhelmingly elected to replace him. The quarreled "votes" will be insufficient to change the results even if assumed all to go in the preferred direction.

I hope there is a higher turnout, rather than a lower one. The higher the turnout, the less likely it is that the California "public service" unions can swing the election in favor of Davis remaining, or worst case, Bustamante taking his place. (But the unions will have a tough time doing either, because they are going to suffer massive defections among the rank and file -- there will be "Ah-nold Democrats" just as there were "Reagan Democrats," though for slightly different reasons.)

I emphasize -- again -- that I am dealing with what IS based on facts on the ground, rather than what OUGHT TO BE based on pure theory. I have no objection to theoretical analysis and spend a lot of time on it. But that has nearly nothing to do with this unique election in California.

Billybob

[daviddennis]

That's why I said I might be too much of a nerd to really understand this. To me, the election system is pretty simple and I understood it from the first time it was explained to me. But I notice that many, many people have an exceptionally difficult time figuring it out.

Many people still don't understand clearly that there are two ballots and don't realize that Gray Davis can't be on the second, and the implications this has.

So you are probably right that the non-alphabetical ballot will be too confusing for many, and the conclusions you have taken from it are accurate, even in my view.

If what you say is true, we can prove it by counting the number of people who voted for or against the recall and compare it to the number who voted on the replacement candidate.

D