Page 2
University Daily Kansan Wednesday, March 4,1964
Voting Machines
In last fall's campus elections, final returns were announced at 3:30 a.m. Several candidates lost who received more first preference votes than those who were elected. Eight invalid votes denied an additional representative to one of the living groups.
LAST NIGHT, the All Student Council passed a resolution that may lead to the shortening, simplification, and safeguarding of this campus' voting procedure.
ASC established a committee to investigate KU's use of voting machines. The election commissioner of Wyandotte County has promised an ASC representative the use of voting machines at no cost except transporting the machines from Kansas City. This cost would be less than the present expense of IBM equipment and material.
With voting machines, election returns would be available in no less than 30 minutes after the polls close.
Under this procedure, invalidated votes would be an impossibility. The machines also provide for write-in votes.
The one major problem that a shift to voting by machines presents is this: the present system of proportional representation and preference voting would probably be impossible.
THE HARE system of proportional representation was adopted in the fall of 1934 by the Men's Student Council. Voters mark candidates in preference order. When a candidate obtains a quota.
enough first-preference votes to be elected, his surplus is redistributed to those indicated as second choices. The number of representatives from a living district is determined by the number of valid ballots cast in the election.
The advantage of this system is supposed to be that membership in a legislative body may be divided between political parties in proportion to their voting strength.
The proportional representation procedure affects only elections in which several representatives are to be chosen from one district. These are the fall elections of living-group representatives to ASC.
At best, preference voting is complicated.
A SIMPLER plan that would work on voting machines is for each voter to mark the number of candidates to be elected. Since the number of representatives have to be determined before the election, a new criterion would have to be found.
One possibility is to base the representation on the number voting in the previous election.
Another possibility more consistent with national, state, and local legislative representation is to base the number on actual population of the living district. Needless to say, this plan would drastically alter the balance of ASC power. But would it not be more representative of the student body?
Margaret Hughes
"Hey, Listen For Just A Little Bit More We Can Get A Real One"
Goldwater: Dashing, Devoted, and Damned
(Edition's Note; This is the first of a
three series on Sen. Barry
Barry Water.)
By Rick Mabbutt
Cheering, placard-waving, college students milled around an old-fashioned bandstand in a park in Austin, Tex. They had come to hear their leader, Barry Morris Goldwater, the junior senator from Arizona.
A reporter tapped one young Goldwater admirer on the shoulder and, having succeeded in getting his attention, asked him how he felt about the senator.
The student jubilantly pointed to a nearby building and said, "You see that building over there? If Goldwater told me to jump off it, I wouldn't even ask why. I'd just go jump!"
AN EXAGGERATION? Perhaps. But who is this man who has captured the loyalty and devotion of a highly vocal crowd of supporters? Who is this man who may be the Republican nominee for the presidency in 1964?
Barry Goldwater was born Jan. 1, 1899, in Phoenix, Ariz., the son of Baron and Josephine Goldwater. His father, a Jew (the name was originally Goldwasser), was a member of the Arizona Territorial Legislature.
Young Barry hated reading anything except Popular Mechanics and he was constantly puttering with gadgets of all kinds. He wired everything in sight, from toilet seats to his bed's headboard.
HE ATTENDED Union High School. where he was a poor student. School officials told his parents he should be a priest, since Latin was the only thing he was good at. But he was popular with his classmates and they elected him class president.
In 1924 his parents sent him to Staunton Military Academy in Virginia, where he continued his high jinks, to the distress of school authorities. They repeatedly asked his father to take him back. After four years he barely managed to be graduated. His record was not all black at Staunton; he was captain of the football team and at graduation he was chosen outstanding cadet.
He attended the University of Arizona for one year but dropped out because of boredom and worked in his family's department store where he had a natural charm and flair for selling. Appealing to the western heritage of the people, he marketed products with cattle brands. He also bottled and sold a successful brand of cologne (naturally named Gold, Water). Goldwater became president of the
company in 1937, and started a national fad with "antsy pants"—men's shorts covered with a design of red ants.
1941 came, and so did the war in Europe. Goldwater, who had been in the Army Reserve, was over age and had bad knees and bad eyes. He saw action as a ferry command pilot in the European and Asiatic theaters.
HAVING COMPiled a respectable war record, Goldwater was released in 1945 as a lieutenant colonel. He rejoined the Reserve and organized the Air Branch, which he served as chief of staff until 1952. The senator is now major-general and the only member of Congress licensed to fly jet aircraft.
jaw, and a wide, smiling mouth combine to make a handsome man. He walks with a slight limp—a result of an injury received in semipro basketball.
ANOTHER POLITICAL advantage is his attractive family. He married Margaret Johnson, daughter of a Muncie, Ind., industrialist, in 1934. They have four children: Joanne (Mrs. Thomas Ross), 25, Barry Jr., 23, Michael, 21, and Peggy, 16.
Joseph Alsop once asked Goldwater if he ever thought about waking up some morning and finding himself in the White House.
"Yes," Goldwater said, "and frankly it scares the hell out of me."
He admits candidly that his first
Barry Goldwater plunged into politics in 1949 when he was elected to the Phoenix City Council on a reform-Republican ticket. Moving on to bigger things, he ran for a U.S. Senate seat in 1952, which he won by 7,000 votes over Ernest McFarland. Senate majority leader under President Truman. Goldwater admitted frankly, "I rode Ike's coattail."
Sen. Goldwater is a dynamo of energy. Civic-minded, he is a Mason, a Shriner, Elk, Moose, a member of the VFW, the American Legion and Sigma Chi. He believes the fraternity system is "a bastion of American strength."
Physically, Barry Goldwater is impressive. A six-footer, he keeps his weight at 185 and is in excellent health, Iron-gray hair, blue eyes, a pleasantly crooked nose, square
book, "The Conscience of a Conservative," and his thrice-weekly syndicated newspaper column are ghosted by Stephan Sheedeg, a Phoenix businessman and his campaign manager and speech writer.
Goldwater also once told a correspondent for the Saturday Evening Post, "You know, I haven't got a really first-class brain."
Some observers, however, disagree with this bit of self-analysis.
RUSSELL KIRK, a leading spokesman for the intellectuals of the right, praises Barry's intellect.
"Mr. Goldwater is more far-sighted than Mr. Kennedy; more quick-witted than Mr. Rockefeller; more self-reliant than Mr. Stevenson; more reflective than Mr. Eisenhower. He is not Disraeli (despite a similar flair) nor is he John Adams (notwithstanding a
certain similar hardheadedness).
"His good humor and friendliness are genuine; yet there remains always a certain reserve, almost invisible to the casual observer, that requires Mr. Goldwater to make up his own mind—and to live his inner life, in the phrase of Marcus Aurelius, 'as if upon a mountain.'
"Perhaps without willing it, the senator retains something now rare; dignity without pomposity."
MOST OF IHS briefings and intellectual assistance Goldwater obtains from a member of a Senate committee staff, or a conservatively inclined professor or two of his acquaintance, or a friendly newspaperman. These briefings, as opposed to the oral discussion favored by the late President Kennedy, usually take the form of a brief memorandum or informal chat.
"But the fact that the senator has gone so far, without a brain trust—this, I suggest, is strong evidence of his mental powers," Kirk savs.
Richard Rovere, writing in the New Yorker, says of Goldwater's characteristics: "He is the most doctrinaire man in American politics and at the same time the most self-bellittung. No one else has so gratuitously exposed to the public his missives, his hesitations, his anxieties, even his political shams.
"THE SENATOR'S CASE is a very odd one. He is a man devoid of vanity who finds himself playing a role that seems to require a good deal of vanity. He is an earnest, hard-working man who likes to present himself—part of the time, anyway—as a mere vote-hustler. He is basically a critic of ideas. He does not offer himself as a superior administrator or organizer. His differences with the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations have not been over the way certain things
were being done but over the fact that they were being done at all.
"His right hand isn't always sure of what his right hand is doing. He has recently rented an electronic computer and hired a staff of punch-card people to determine the nature and extent of the doctrinal commitments he has made. Part of his difficulty, of course, is that he has said so much and sigmed so much that came from other right hands." Oh, hell. I've got ghosts all over the place," he has said.
Rev
"Ignorant but shrewd," says one of his colleagues. "He's read very little. He has no knowledge of economics. He's completely outside the world of ideas. Even his passion for the Constitution is based upon a misunderstanding of its nature."
The senator replied: "The truth is this: The answers to our problems are easy, but they are very hard to augment. The academic mind of the average radical can't understand simplification. The conservative answer is simple. Many answers can be black or white. In my years in business I learned that after you work on a problem long enough, the answers are very obvious."
A LIBERAL WRITER, Gore Viday, hesitates, saying: "I am not sure I would agree that Goldwater's ignorance of ideas is necessarily relevant to his ability or his capacity for growth."
A reporter once asked Goldwater, "Senator, your critics say you think in pure black and white teams and see no shades of gray. Do you consider this a sly insult to your mental processes?"
O train journey of f four Cha
Some critics have held that his shifting between doctrinal positions is not a mark of "conscious inconsistency . . . but of a consistent looseness of mind."
Daili'Yränsan
bounded 1889, became biweekly 1904, triweekly 1908, dauv van. 16.1912.
Member Inland Daily Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press.
Represented by National Advertising Service, 18 East 50 St., New York 22,
N.Y. News service: United Press International. Mail subscription rates:
$3 a semester or $5 a year. Published in Lawrence, Kan. every afternoon
during the University year except Saturdays and Sundays, University
holidays, and examination periods. Second class postage paid at Lawrence,
Kansas.