Voting Reforms Require Education

* Re “Voting Reforms Join Race for Funding,” Dec. 13: Rather than spending billions of dollars for new voting systems, we should spend a much smaller amount on voter education. If the poll workers instructed each voter to check for incompletely punched ballots, we would avoid the problems we had in the last election. In addition, most voters will now be aware of these problems.

HOWARD FRIEDEN

Pasadena

*

* Re George Skelton’s Dec. 14 column calling for touch-screen voting: I heartily agree, as long as it is implemented uniformly and as long as it is accompanied by a thorough voter-training and education program regarding the touch screen’s use. For if it is not implemented uniformly, then you engender exactly the kind of “equal protection” problems that the U.S. Supreme Court has just ruled on in Florida.

As for voter training: I am of the opinion that at least part of the huge “overvote” in Palm Beach County may have stemmed from a fundamental lack of understanding as to how a computer punch card works. It is quite believable that the elderly voters (and the 20-year-olds), having had little experience with computer punch cards in their lives, thought they were correcting their mistaken Buchanan vote by subsequently punching in a vote for Al Gore. In implementing touch-screen voting (or any new voting mechanism), voter education must accompany the technology. If it does not, then the new technology will generate voter error (just as punch cards have done) from the technologically uneducated voter and act as a barrier to participation by the technophobic voter.

ROBERT EARLE

Torrance

*

* Michael C. Dorf, vice dean and professor of law at Columbia (Commentary, Dec. 14), says the Supreme Court pulled a bait and switch. Douglas W. Kmiec says it wasn’t politics, it was law. Kmiec is on the faculty of law at Pepperdine, which so admired Kenneth Starr. Kmiec himself just happened to be an advisor to George W. Bush’s legal team. Whom do you believe?

Personally, though not having voted for Gore but having read both the decision and the dissents, I tend to agree with Justice John Paul Stevens and wonder if Kmiec also has strong views on the tooth fairy.

ARTHUR YUWILER

Woodland Hills

*

* In reading your Dec. 14 issue, it almost seemed that I was reading a Democrat Party newsletter until I read Kmiec’s commentary on the Supreme Court ruling on counting the Florida votes. He accurately reported the 7-2 opinion on the constitutionality of the recounts, in addition to the 5-4 decision on stopping the recount.

One of the major aims of the court was to prevent a constitutional crisis, in which the legislature would be forced to decide the election. As the professor pointed out, “The court’s decision is law, not politics.”

He also concluded that, similar to Florida, there were about 2% of the votes nationally that failed to indicate any vote for president.

BYRON SLATER

San Diego

*

* Re “Never Again Will We View the Judiciary as Nonpolitical,” Dec. 14: Comrade Robert Scheer should give it a rest. In his deluded mind, there will always be a second chad on a grassy knoll. The Florida Supremes were the ones who played politics, and David Boies wrote the playbook for them. Remember, your viewpoint will always depend on whose political ox is being “Gored.”

DAVID TWITCHELL

Chatsworth

*

* Despite the impassioned appeals of Vice President Gore and President-elect Bush for the nation to rise above partisan feelings, I see your editorial cartoonists have chosen to continue their ideological harangues. Michael Ramirez clearly cannot resist one final shot at Gore (“Gore rides gracefully into the sunset,” Dec. 14). I wonder just who will be his future targets now that Republicans will be in control of Washington? But, silly me, there is always Hillary Clinton.

As for Paul Conrad, I am disappointed that he feels the need to sink to Ramirez’s level. It would have behooved him to rise above the name-calling and show the president-elect the respect he deserves (“The Grinch who stole the presidency,” Dec. 14).

RONALD FONTENOT

Los Angeles