Smarter than your average bear
I do think voters on the whole are smarter than non-voters -- not that the results of dozens of electoral contests one can point to over a lifetime can be said to offer much support for this theory.
But, Jesse Helms, 1964's Proposition 14 and all the other idiot political successes notwithstanding, democracy is slightly better than the alternative. And those who manage to show up at the polls, or mail in a ballot, are slightly more informed than those who do not.
So I think that every vote should count. And how can it count if it's not counted? Not just votes that "make a difference in the outcome" -- every vote makes a difference, if only as part of the historical record.
So I don't buy L.A. County acting Registrar Recorder Dean Logan 's excuse that it's too hard to count, or to determine the voters' intent on, all the 49,500 decline-to-state votes that were messed up in the polling Feb. 5.
These are the non-party voters who failed to mark the bubble at the top of the ballot indicating they were independents but were voting in the Democratic Party (or wacko American Independent Party) primaries. (Libertarians and Republicans don't allow such cross-dressing.) The bubble trouble is not necessarily the voters' fault. Poor training led many poll workers to be badly misinformed about how to instruct voters. So it's the system that's at fault. And the system should fix it. Much stronger efforts than have been made should be made to determine the intent of the voters in question.
Even if it's not going to make "a difference" in the Obama-Clinton California primary, there are super-delegates out there who have not joined either camp. It's important for them to know how Californians actually voted before they cast their own fat-cat ballots at the Demo convention this summer.
Look for Kitty Felde's take on the situation on Wednesday's opinion pages -- Kitty, the veteran KPCC special correspondent, was a poll worker herself on Feb. 5.