Opinion: Kids vote early and often for Obama

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The first tally is in, and it’s Barack Obama by a landslide: 59% to John McCain’s 41%. No, we’re not talking newspaper endorsements (that foreordained result would have been even more lopsided) or absentee ballots cast by PLO sympathizers. (Here’s a link to the tape!) (Psych!!!) Ahh, juvenile humor. And how appropriate, given that the votes in question were cast Monday by elementary-school students all across the country. Utah-based Studies Weekly, which publishes newspapers and magazines for children, was the main sponsor, and its website was the venue where the vast majority of student voters registered their support for Obama or McCain. (There were no third parties on the ballot -- sorry, that’s reserved for kids who’ve taken algebra.) Children’s Way of Castro Valley, Calif., which operates the Woogi World website for kids, also participated.

Unfortunately, with the results also comes our first controversy over electronic voting machines: it appears that more than 80% of the votes cast at the Studies Weekly site weren’t counted.

Voting, which was open to students in grades K through 6, took place in elementary-school classrooms and computer labs in all 50 states. Teachers supervised the process, and the site used access codes to help maintain a one-kid, one-vote discipline. Ed Rickers of Studies Weekly said his company sent about 900,000 special issues of its newspaper to help teachers discuss elections, the two-party system, the Electoral College and the two major-party presidential candidates. ‘You just try to be as totally unbiased as possible,’ he said. When asked if the material discussed whether McCain was too old for the job or Obama too much of a socialist, Rickers laughed and said his company stuck to their resumes and lists of accomplishments. (Which makes me wonder, how on earth did Obama win?) ‘These are kids. We leave the indoctrination to their parents and whoever else,’ Rickers said.

Unfortunately, the company may have been too clever for its own good. It designed the site to impose a two-minute break between voters by popping up a screen with a 120-second countdown after each vote was cast. Naturally, kids found that they could make the 120-second countdown disappear simply by refreshing the page. But although this technique appeared to eliminate the delay and let kids cast votes more quickly, in reality it merely enabled a lot of kids to cast votes that weren’t counted. Four million kids were registered in advance to vote, and the company expected a couple million more to cast ballots. But while the voting site recorded 6 million page views -- right in line with the upper end of expectations -- less than 800,000 votes were counted. Oh well. I’ll leave it to you readers to suggest whether impatient kids were more likely to have favored Obama or McCain.

Only a few thousand votes were recorded at the Woogi World site, which is probably a good thing ‘cause those ballots were, ummm, inconsistent with widely accepted U.S. voting principles. To put it simply, the site paid kids to vote. OK, maybe that’s a little harsh. Sony BMG Music Entertainment, the major record company, provided an assortment of prizes (free CDs, song downloads, posters and the like) to those who took part in the ‘civics adventure’ on Woogi World. And come to think of it, that’s pretty much what Starbucks is doing for their parents....

Graphic courtesy of Studies Weekly and Children’s Way