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Dr. Alexander Keyssar and Dr. Elizabeth Theiss-Morse were adversaries of a different sort when addressing the theme of the 2002 annual Maine Town Meeting. Keyssar, the Matthew W. Stirling, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, approached the democratic process in quite another fashion, what he calls the “Project of Democracy.” He spoke specifically about the 2000 election and some of the lessons voters learned in that election: (1) voters do not have a constitutional right to vote in presidential elections; (2) the principle of one person/one vote does not apply in presidential elections, thanks to the structure of the Electoral College; (3) if you are registered to vote, your name may or may not appear on registration lists; (4) if turnout in an election was ever really high, we would still be in line; (5) if you vote, your vote will probably be counted, but maybe not; millions of ballots will be tossed because of improper markings and machine malfunctions; (6) if you are black, the odds that your vote will be tossed are four to ten times greater than if you are white; (7) if you are poor or have only a high school education or less, the odds that you will vote at all are less than half that for people who are wealthy or better educated; and (8) if, for whatever reason, you are deprived of the right to vote, you can trust that a political party will help you if its leaders are convinced that they will benefit by doing so. “The Project of Democracy is the project of opposing those anti-democratic forces, of taking many steps, big and small, to insure that all voices are heard and that all carry equal weight,” says Keyssar.
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Copyright ©1999 Margaret Chase Smith Library. |