A Stitch in Haste

To all my fellow anti-majoritarianist bloggers who thought they were being so clever by noting the incidents where people showed up to vote in states that were not holding primaries yesterday:

I see your no-primary-today and raise you an invisible-ink-pen:

Twenty voters at a Far North Side precinct [in Chicago] who found their ink pens not working were told by election judges not to worry.

It's invisible ink, officials said. The scanner will count it.

But their votes weren't recorded after all.

"Part of me was thinking it does sound stupid enough to be true," said Amy Carlton, who had serious doubts but went ahead and voted anyway.

As it turns out, Carlton was one of 20 voters at the precinct who were given the wrong pen to use. They were also then told, apparently by a misinformed judge, that the pens have invisible ink, elections officials said.

As I noted previously:

Allowing the ignorant, the irrational or the paranoid to vote might be better than the alternative of deciding how to exclude them from voting. I think it is. But the fact that they do vote is all the more reason to constrain ex ante both what (e.g., bigot amendments) and whom ("I have a million ideas. The country can't afford them all...") such people can actually vote for.

Assuming, of course, that they can find a pen.