<x-flowed>   Just a short historical note that's mostly irrelevant to the 527 controversy burning the wires up:  It's just not true, as Richard asserts, that every person of good will approved the Australian Ballot after 1888.  In fact, that ballot, as I showed in "The Shaping of Southern Politics" 30 years ago, was widely used in the South as a disfranchising device, and there were major controversies over the same intentions and effects in New York and New Jersey and perhaps elsewhere.  It amounted to a literacy test in English at a time when a great many voters weren't literate in English.
  And it could be manipulated.  In Virginia in 1894, a ballot in one congressional district was printed in German Fractur script.  In Louisiana in 1898, the election for delegates to the state's constitutional convention, which was widely understood to have the purpose of disfranchising blacks, was printed without party designations.  In addition to the district delegates (which were grouped by party with the Democrats, who designed the ballot, in the first group), each voter had to vote for 36 delegates for the state at-large.  There were four slates, with the regular Democrats first.  Each voter had 2.5 minutes to complete his ballot.  One state Supreme Court judge's ballot was invalidated because of that time limit.
  The perhaps relevant points are that almost any reform election movement will certainly have partisan implications, which politicians generally understand, and it may have racial or ethnic implications, as well.  This is nothing new, it is unavoidable, and the fact that political scientists ignored the disfranchising intent and effect of the Australian ballot for over 80 years, until I rediscovered it -- and most continue to do so -- distorted their analysis of the "reform."
Morgan

Prof. of History and Social Science, Caltech
snail mail:  228-77 Caltech, Pasadena, CA 91125
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to order Colorblind Injustice:  http://uncpress.unc.edu/books/T-388.html
          "Peace if possible, Justice at any rate" -- Wendell Phillips

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